Hi folks, Will there be an additional button in the editor, to implement formulas? Or is there?

Oh thanks ricardo - that was quick I think the MathTran should be good for now....until maybe something in-editor is developed Do you have experience with MathTran and linking it to the page? Does it work good and project all LaTex formulae? That would be good to know, before i go out there and tell everybody i have a solution :-). Alan From: users-bounces(a)xwiki.org [mailto:users-bounces@xwiki.org] On Behalf Of [Ricardo Rodriguez] Your EPEC Network ICT Team Sent: Wednesday, 20 February 2008 09:57 To: XWiki Users Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Latex html in editor for math formulas? A.Aqrawi(a)iaea.org wrote: Hi, You must be aware of this... http://i2geo.net/bin/Sandbox/Formulae There is at least a thread in xwiki-devs dealing with this issue. Look for MathTran there. http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp? forum=2564&local=y&query=MathTran Hope this helps, Ricardo

Alan, Ricardo, what's on i2geo.net will be published soon. It's just a macro and a javascript embedding and uses the MathTran server. The syntax? real LaTeX, which is indeed running at mathtran.org. No own macros though. That also means it's full LaTeX contrary to most latex-imitators (but which, often, can do mathml for example). We should be announcing this in a few days... probably starting as a jira issue that contains the jar. It may take a fair more time to get high-quality printouts though... i.e. either that someone works on the print-channel-through tex (which is fragile because tex is a very old system) or that we work out on the dvi inclusion in the print channel. Would there be a better space to publish these ? we could start a project on our libresource forge, but maybe the XWiki folks team has a better place? paul

The more I think about the more I like idea b) below. This means there would be 2 options for anyone wanting to contribute code: 1) If the person is interested in xwiki in general, the best is the contribute it in xwiki's SVN itself and have the person be made a committer 2) if the person is interested only in a specific thing, like a macro he has developed, a plugin, an app, and is looking for a place where he/she can contribute with others on it, then this special forge project is the perfect place. Now we need to find a name for it and then creating it is quick and easy. I propose to name it "xlet" which means an xwiki extension in general. Any other idea?

On Feb 20, 2008, at 12:38 PM, [Ricardo Rodriguez] Your EPEC Network ICT Team wrote: I think I was not clear. I see this macro going into this "xlet"' project but not in a project on its own since that's a lot more maintenance to do... I'd rather we have a single project for now and if one of the module in there outgrows the project then it could move to be a top level project.

Alan, Ricardo, what's on i2geo.net will be published soon. It's just a macro and a javascript embedding and uses the MathTran server. The syntax? real LaTeX, which is indeed running at mathtran.org. No own macros though. That also means it's full LaTeX contrary to most latex-imitators (but which, often, can do mathml for example). We should be announcing this in a few days... probably starting as a jira issue that contains the jar. It may take a fair more time to get high-quality printouts though... i.e. either that someone works on the print-channel-through tex (which is fragile because tex is a very old system) or that we work out on the dvi inclusion in the print channel.

The more I think about the more I like idea b) below. This means there would be 2 options for anyone wanting to contribute code: 1) If the person is interested in xwiki in general, the best is the contribute it in xwiki's SVN itself and have the person be made a committer 2) if the person is interested only in a specific thing, like a macro he has developed, a plugin, an app, and is looking for a place where he/she can contribute with others on it, then this special forge project is the perfect place. Now we need to find a name for it and then creating it is quick and easy. I propose to name it "xlet" which means an xwiki extension in general. Any other idea?

WDYT? Thanks -Vincent PS: for those who are maven afficionado, this is equivalent to the mojo project at codehaus. On Feb 20, 2008, at 11:08 AM, Vincent Massol wrote: > > On Feb 20, 2008, at 10:50 AM, Paul Libbrecht wrote: > >> Alan, Ricardo, >> >> what's on i2geo.net will be published soon. It's just a macro and a >> javascript embedding and uses the MathTran server. >> >> The syntax? real LaTeX, which is indeed running at mathtran.org. No >> own macros though. >> That also means it's full LaTeX contrary to most latex-imitators (but >> which, often, can do mathml for example). >> >> We should be announcing this in a few days... probably starting as a >> jira issue that contains the jar. >> >> It may take a fair more time to get high-quality printouts though... >> i.e. either that someone works on the print-channel-through tex >> (which is fragile because tex is a very old system) or that we work >> out on the dvi inclusion in the print channel. >> >> Would there be a better space to publish these ? >> we could start a project on our libresource forge, but maybe the >> XWiki folks team has a better place? > > 1) For publishing the jar, the best is probably the xwiki code zone > 2) For the source code, it really depends on you. You have 3 options I > can think of: > > a) a project wherever you want (sourceforge, libresource, etc) > > b) a project on the XWiki Forge. This is not advertised yet but we > have a XWiki Forge for hosting projects related to XWiki. We give > those projects a SVN repo, a wiki (as in http://<project > name>.xwiki.org)rg), a JIRA project, mailing lists, etc. Note that since > the machines and admin are currently owned and done by XWiki SAS, it's > its decision to decide what project get in. This project would > definitely fit in. > > Since maybe creating a project just for one macro would be a bit too > much, we could create a general purpose project for hosting outside > contributions (plugins, macros, applications). Actually I think this > would be a very good idea. It would be very open and anyone asking > would get commit access to it. > > c) you're interested in participating to the xwiki development and in > this case we include your macro in the xwiki source code and we vote > you in as a committer to improve and support it (of course that would > be after seeing the source code and ensuring it complies with the > xwiki coding conventions, etc). > > Let us know what you'd prefer. > > Thanks > -Vincent > >> Le 20 févr. 08 à 10:17, &lt;A.Aqrawi(a)iaea.org >> <mailto:A.Aqrawi@iaea.org>> a écrit : >> >>> Oh thanks ricardo - that was quick >>> >>> I think the MathTran should be good for now....until maybe something >>> in-editor is developed >>> Do you have experience with MathTran and linking it to the page? >>> Does it work good and project all LaTex formulae? >>> >>> That would be good to know, before i go out there and tell everybody >>> i have a solution :-). >>> >>> Alan >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> From: users-bounces(a)xwiki.org <mailto:users-bounces@xwiki.org> >>> [mailto:users-bounces@xwiki.org] On Behalf Of [Ricardo Rodriguez] >>> Your EPEC Network ICT Team >>> Sent: Wednesday, 20 February 2008 09:57 >>> To: XWiki Users >>> Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Latex html in editor for math formulas? >>> >>> A.Aqrawi(a)iaea.org wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi folks, >>>> >>>> Will there be an additional button in the editor, to implement >>>> formulas? >>>> Or is there? >>>> >>> >>> Hi, >>> >>> You must be aware of this... >>> >>> http://i2geo.net/bin/Sandbox/Formulae >>> >>> There is at least a thread in xwiki-devs dealing with this issue. >>> Look for MathTran there. >>> >>> http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=2564&local=y&query=Mat… >>> >>> Hope this helps, >>> >>> Ricardo >>> >>

We're currently using FOP to generate PDFs. FOP cannot use DVIs (at least not currently, with the available external resource plugins). It does support some EPS.

However, using the TeX system brings some problems: - there is a dependency on an external tool, as we cannot bundle a TeX system.

- TeX is pretty slow.

If it is used only for generating the PDF export of a wiki document with few equations, then that is not a major issue, since exporting PDF is not something frequently done. But imagine using it for displaying a document with several equations (>20), and how long it would take to make 20 shell commands to start TeX, generate the eps files, load those files from the disk, and send them to the client. No way this would work without a proper cache.

Another way to generate nice graphics from LaTeX equations is by combining these tools: one that converts LaTeX to MathML, and one that converts MathML to something else.

The first tool is needed as LaTeX is not quite an open standard. There is only one fully supported compiler, and it has limitations. On the other hand, MathML is interesting even as a final equation format, as some browsers have support for it, although with some problems. But there are many tools that work with MathML, viewers, editors, converters... Two candidates I found during a small Google session: http://math.etsu.edu/LaTeXMathML/LaTeXMathML.js -> LaTeX => MathML converter in JavaScript. The code should be converted to Java, so that the whole process can be done in the native language for XWiki. http://jeuclid.sourceforge.net/ -> MathML multipurpose tool. among others, it has a MathML => PNG converter, and a FOP plugin to directly support MathML in the XML source, which are preserved in the generated PDF. This means that we don't need to separately convert equations into something else and then include some images in the PDF, but we can use one XML file that contains all the XHTML source and the MathML equations. These tools can be combined into a Radeox filter + macro. The filter allows a fast syntax, like $$\sum(i)$$, while the macro allows some customization, like {latex:align=right|zoom=2|background=yellow}\sum(i){latex} Another TeX=>MML converter I found is BlahTeXML, but it is written in C. And the code is not so comprehensible, so porting it to java will be harder. However, by comparing the size of blah and the js converter above, I'd say that probably blah does a better job at the conversion.

That is exactly one of the problems with MathTran: It is on a remote host. This means that: - it might not be usable in some strict intranets, where there's no or restricted access to the internet - If the MathTran server is down, then no images will appear - It increases the traffic to an external server If it were to be installed on a local server, then we're back to the other problem: heavy installation.

Still, it is TeX and not LaTeX, as I read in the Moodle page talking about MathTran. This is a drawback, as LaTeX users will be confused. I, for one, know only the LaTeX syntax.

A problem with non-TeX is that the result is not as good looking as a TeX one. Damn, those articles look good! Still, the wiki is not meant to be the complete article authoring product. It is just the place where the authors can collaborate on the article, and have a fair preview of how the document would look, then export it as a LaTeX document which can be processed by a real tex system.

And another thing is that the STIX fonts are almost (!) ready. They are passed the beta preview stage, and will soon be final. Perhaps MathML and PNG-ed MathML equation will look better with those fonts.

I'd say that the web is moving towards XML and XML languages. MathML belongs to the future. There are much more tools that support MathML than (La)TeX. Still, asking users to write MathML in the wiki content is too much. So, there should be support for LaTeX equations, but they should not be interpreted by a TeX engine (be it local or a remote service), instead they should be transformed into MathML (as good as possible, whenever there's a difference it can be addressed and fixed).