[Bibulus-dev] Re: Math

[Torsten Bronger]

Halloechen!

address@hidden (Thomas M. Widmann) writes:

> [...]
>> Of course, the XML tools must be able to find the MathML DTD.  I had
>> problems with this point.  Unless we have a counterpart for SGML's
>> Catalog scheme, I put everything into one big file called
>> hmml2dst.dtd and included it with
>> 
>> <!ENTITY % MathML-and-HTML-distillated.dtd 
>>        PUBLIC "-//Torsten Bronger//DTD MathML 2.0 distillated and HTML 4.0 
>> entities//EN" 
>>               "hmml2dst.dtd">
>>  %MathML-and-HTML-distillated.dtd;
>> 
>> in my DTD.
>
> Doesn't that lead to copyright problems?  What's the license for
> the MathML DTD?

     Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute the XHTML 1.1 DTD and
     its accompanying documentation for any purpose and without fee is
     hereby granted in perpetuity, provided that the above copyright notice
     and this paragraph appear in all copies.  The copyright holders make
     no representation about the suitability of the DTD for any
     purpose.

You don't understand why it says "XHTML"?  I don't understand it,
too.  The whole MathML DTD is a little bit sloppy.

>> Probably it's wise to switch to something like the following
>> 
>> <!ENTITY % inline "(#PCDATA | b | i | t | math)*">
>> 
>> for all inline content models eventually.  Most DTDs do something
>> like this.  Alternatively, you can use the "mml:" namespace for
>> math.  It's possibly more secure, but I think it just makes typing
>> more difficult.
>
> Indeed, but of course math is probably the exception in
> bibliographies.  Something to consider.

Well, if you don't use it, you don't feel its presence in the DTD.
But you're right, it should not distract you from creating the core
of your DTD.

>> > [...]
>> >
>> >> For LaTeX (or BibTeX), you have to convert it with e.g. XSLT.  But
>> >> this has been done already by numerous people.
>> >
>> > Has it?  Do you have a reference?  And is any implementation of it
>> > released under the GNU license so that we can include it?
>> 
>> I did it for my tbook DTD.  But you have to extract the MathML code,
>> I'm afraid.
>
> How difficult would that be, you think?

Rough estimate: one weekend.

>> The same is true for Casellas' db2latex at
>> <http://db2latex.sf.net>.  Gurari tried it, too, but it was not a
>> very serious approach, just a test.  However it shows how simple it
>> can be basically.  All three variants are very free, I think.
>
> OK.  Which one would you recommend, given that Bibulus is written in
> Perl?  I'll try to find some time to read up on all three, but I don't
> promise it'll be very soon.

I don't know Perl.  Is there an XSLT processor for Perl?  I've never
heard of one.  Saxon and Xalan are Java, Xalan also in C++, xt is
java.  I'm afraid you would have to call an XSLT processor as an
external application.

But I've seen some examples of XML-->LaTeX conversion directly in
Perl in a book (The LaTeX Web Companion by Goosens/Rahtz).  It's not
as elegant as in XSLT, but it works.  However using this for MathML
is totally new I think.  You could not use existing code.

>> I regard my approach as the best one because it is the most
>> complete.  You need only a subset because only inline math is
>> interesting in bibliographies I think.
>
> I agree.  How much code are we talking about to handle inline math,
> and is it in XSLT?

It is XSLT code, and I would say 500 lines without comments.

> [...]
>
>> @MISC{tbook,
>>    title = "The {\sffamily \textbf{t}book} system for XML authoring",
>>    author = "Torsten Bronger",
>>    url = "http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net";,
>>    year = 2003,
>>    month = mar,
>> }
>
> Very interesting.  I very much like the idea.  Do you recommend we use
> tbook for Bibulus documentation?

Yes, I even think that it's more useful than DocBook.  But I think
that texinfo is the best alternative.  tbook is documented via
texinfo, too.

>> (And I'm still looking for a good BibTeX replacement in tbook. ;-))
>
> It certainly would be very easy to make an output module called
> Bibulus::tbook which would output the bibliography in tbook XML.

This is not necessary.  I can import e.g. raw or cooked DocBook
bibliographies, and maybe even the Bibulus XML file itself.

Tschoe,
Torsten.