docbook-apps

Hi docbook scribers,
this is my first post here.

I'm using the toolchains:
docbook XML -- xsltproc + XSL --> HTML
docbook XML -- xsltproc + XSL --> fo -- fop --> PDF

to issue the PDF and HTML versions of a docbook document.

I would like to use the tex notation for equations, then somehow
automatically issue the corresponding gif/PNG files for each equation
to be displayed in the HTML files.

I think this should be possible, but the only relevant reference I
found googling around is this quite old post:
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200112/msg00035.html

dating December 2001, while the DBTex method seems only to work with
DSSSL.

I would like to avoid to use MathML, due to its need for a graphical
editor, so using the compact tex notation plus the possibility to
exploit the same beatiful equation rendering engine of tex seems the
ideal solution.

Could you suggest where can I start to search to solve this problem?

Many thanks in advance.

Cheers
--
Stefano Sabatini
Linux user number 337176 (see http://counter.li.org)

Stefano Sabatini wrote:

> I think this should be possible, but the only relevant reference I
> found googling around is this quite old post:
> http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200112/msg00035.html
>
> dating December 2001, while the DBTex method seems only to work with
> DSSSL.

I'm quoting page to which you linked above:

"I just commit few changes to XSL stylesheets to CVS. XSL stylesheets
now directly support TeX equations in documents. It is XSL based
implementation of DBTeXMath by Allin Cottrell"

So from this statement it seems apparent that this method is supported
also by XSL stylesheets. For more information you can see:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/TexMath.html

> I would like to avoid to use MathML, due to its need for a graphical
> editor,

You can easily paste MathML code into DocBook for example from
OpenOffice equation editor.

> so using the compact tex notation plus the possibility to
> exploit the same beatiful equation rendering engine of tex seems the
> ideal solution.

If you want to render TeX math in browser you should consider using
excellent jsMath package:

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/

It gives much more better results then equations stored as bitmap images.

It is not directly supported by DocBook XSL stylesheets, but if there
are request for this feature, I can extend TeX math support in DocBook
stylesheets to emit markup required by jsMath.

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