Re: math notation

From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Mon Mar 25 2002 - 17:56:47 EST

  • Next message: Alan Horkan: "Re: math notation"

    On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 23:30, Bruce Koehn wrote:
    > Abiword could become the darling of the scientific world
    > if it could handle mathematical notation in a manner similar
    > to TeX.
    >
    > 1. The scientific world, especially those funded by grants, avoid
    > using MS-Word because it isn't free. So compatibility with MS-Word
    > is a non-issue (or at least not an important issue).
    >
    > 2. The very low cost of Abiword is attractive to poor scientists.
    >
    > 3. Cross platform compatibility would make life much easier since
    > such a variety of platforms are used in the scientific world.
    >
    > 4. Internationalization is another driver because scientists tend
    > to communinicate internationally.
    >
    > 5. Except for mathematical constructs, TeX and LaTeX are difficult
    > to use well. Merging the best of Abiword and TeX makes sense.
    >
    > 6. XML would be apealing to many scientists who prefer the ability
    > to use a text editor for much of their authoring work.
    >
    > I don't know if XML has tags for producing mathematical text ala
    > TeX but such tags should not be hard to define.

    Just to remove any confusion, XML is a generic stuff. You can do
    virtually everything in XML: drawing, preference files, text layout,
    text content, programming, RPC, maths. XML is just a way to format those
    descriptive data. Read XML does not mean "I understand any XML file".

    Yes, this feature is planned, but a post 1.0 release, don't know which
    one. And we don't know yet how it will be done.

    Hub



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