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.