Subject: categories: Re: Diagrams on the WWW ?

From: "Lars Lindqvist" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 20:39:41 CET

Paul and Michael,

There is perhaps no realistic alternative to LaTeX for writing mathematics 
today, but MathML is a language for the future and I like the visions and 
the goals associated with this language. I will not try to argue for MathML 
here because this is done in the specification (actually a draft) at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-MathML2-19991222. As discussed in Section 1.3.1 
(Layered Design of Mathematical Web Services) MathML provides the lower 
level of a two layer architecture where LaTeX would be a language (tool) at 
the higher level (generating MathML code).

There already exists several different tools for converting LaTeX to MathML 
so a straightforward solution would be to construct a converter also for 
some popular diagram specification language (package). Since MathML does not 
support the specification of  complicated labelled diagrams the output would 
be a mixture of MathML and e.g. VML (or SVG) which are markup languages for 
vector graphics. This would also be in accordance with Section 7.1.5.2 of 
the MathML specification.

So I suppose I have to reformulate my question from my first letter and ask 
whether there are any such tools or converters?

I do not know much about the PDF format. When I publish a document written 
in LaTeX on the web I usually generate a postscript version and a PDF 
version (generated using Adobe distiller).

Thanks for your replies.

Lars L
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