[xwiki-devs] [xwiki-users] New product proposal and request for volunteers

[Paul Libbrecht]

Dear Sergiu,

Not far from now we'll give a shot at least at using MathTran (http:// 
www.mathtran.org/) for LaTeX equations integration. Estimate 2-6  
months. This uses a real TeX process to actually doing the whole  
rendering. The nice bit is that this means it's full LaTeX so there's  
no-one really asking questions about that tiny annoying difference  
with LaTeX.

The problem remains that it is not fully possible to be agile...  
MathTran delivers pictures... that's good but that suffers several  
drawbacks (accessibility, printing, ...).

In practice it's impossible to deliver something else from full LaTeX  
(except of course vector graphics, provided the fonts can be  
delivered or are there).

Among the best alternative candidates are MathML-presentation (which  
scales and prints very well). I think we should also offer something  
such as the wikipedia syntax which has a converter to MathML. And  
also something such a more semantic syntax which would convert to  
MathML-content and OpenMath (allowing much more luxury, e.g. symbol  
explanation, math-search...)

I am still unclear on tinyMCE embedding but it'll be there in the  
wiki-syntax.

paul



Le 6 févr. 08 à 13:22, Sergiu Dumitriu a écrit :

> Hi everybody,
>
> On the mailing lists, we noticed several people trying to use XWiki in
> academic environments, requesting features such as support for
> mathematical equations or support for LaTeX.
>
> We took some time to design a product that would be great for writing
> scientific papers, identifying some important features, and some  
> "would
> be nice to have" features. You can see the current design proposal at
> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/SPAWN (feel free to send
> comment on the mailing list).
>
> Given the fact that this is not a product which can easily be sold,  
> and
> that there are other more critical projects to work on for the moment,
> the core XWiki developers cannot dedicate much time on it. This is why
> we need help from the community. Whoever would like to use this  
> product,
> and has the power and knowledge to work on in, please help us.
>
> If you are in an university as a student, you can propose one of the
> sub-applications as a project for one of your classes. If you are a
> teacher, you can propose some sub-applications as student projects. We
> can help with coordination, more detailed description/requirements,
> question answering, code review, etc.
>
> Some of the features require mostly programming skills, while others
> require more advanced research skills, like the positioned comments  
> in a
> dynamic text (adapting some sequence alignment algorithms from
> bioinformatics seems the best idea for the moment, but also some fuzzy
> systems theory could be applied), or an automatic merge algorithm  
> based
> on Operational Transformations, so some publications can come out of
> this, too.
>
> If we gather a few volunteers, I'll make the necessary Jira setup and
> mark the product as active.
>
> Regards,
> The XWiki dev team
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list
> users at xwiki.org
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users

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