How to get Mathematical Content into ActiveMath: Step by Step
101: From Paper, Print, Board or Digital Presentations To ActiveMath Content Collections?
Some authors and editors of Mathematics are engaging in a dialogue with the developers of ActiveMath.
Authors may express their ideas choosing paper, print, board or digital representations, resulting in beautifully grafted articles, aesthetically pleasing board drawings or magnificently Donald E. Knuth inspired typeset *TeX manifestations.
How do we put that into ActiveMath?
From the Black/Whiteboard to ActiveMath
To Whom It May Concern
Phase 1
You have a mathematical idea, you want to share it, invite others to comment, and exchange opinions.
- How have you phrased your idea?
- On paper, on a computer, or otherwise?
Please let us know. [poll ?]
This typography step is pretty classical, the encoding basically attempts at encoding the appearance of the blackboard into an interface such as the LaTeX language or the Maple UI.
For the LaTeX target:
- Formulæ will need some revision to go to full semantic… let’s just be happy with presentation now.
- Text will be text… avoid putting fancy TeX-like accents though… that also removes readability… declare an encoding and use all characters of it (e.g. iso-latin-1)
- Parts of contents will be separated with some semantic in mind, here a warning, here an example, here a definition. Using [LaTeX environments][http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/Theorems.html] is probably a good idea although I have no exact converter for this info yet.
For the Maple target:
- Formulæ can be entered in many ways in Maple and be computable or not. Only the computable ones will be automatically convertible to Maple (one day).
- Text is text… I think this is not a deal in Maple
- For parts of contents in Maple, I think there is something but I do not know them.
Examples
It would be nice to find a few blackboard pictures we could encode here.
Maple to somewhat-OMDoc
Maple has an option to export content-mathml in html export… it’s a horrible thing packed inside an applet parameter within an html4 document but there are still hopes to parse this with htmlparser and expand the MathML-content elements off the parameters.I am fond of jelly for this purpose.
So with a bit of time, it sounds like a good way would be:
- Maple export to html with mathml-content
- apply the jelly to get xml code with MathML-content formulæ as much as possible
- apply, maybe, a stylesheet to convert this to OMDoc (this stage is fragile since it probably depends on the macro-structure used in Maple).
I am willing to make the jelly script but will need help for the XSL in the form of potential examples.