Re: [docbook-apps] Source of Docbook + MathML -> PDF examples?

["Chris Chiasson" <chris@chiasson.name>]

One free way to go from MathML to pdf is via SVG Math, a python
script. I intended to use this script to make my inline math have the
correct baseline shift, but I haven't done anything with it yet. Do
you really intend to use FOP instead of XEP or Arbortext E3? I hope
you like full page width tables.

What I currently do for PDFs with math is to generate an EPS form of
the equation. If it is an inline equation (where an EPS will not give
the correct baseline shift without some extra doing), I check to see
if the math can be represented as a string of characters with
superscripts and subscripts. If so, then I output the DocBook markup
for the string. If it is more complicated than that, I currently go
with the EPS.

I generate it all automatically (including the MathML, the EPSs, the
conditional formatting, etc). It doesn't look bad when I use the
personal edition of XEP.

There are several caveats though. One is that, since I am working with
DocBook 5 (it brings several features to the table), I constantly have
problems with the node-set processing (causing many headaches for the
(much) more experienced contributors to the DocBook project). Another
is that the programs I use to generate the math have problems running
together 64 bit computers  (Ant is a Java building program; MathLink
and JLink for Mathematica 5.2 is 32 bit - this doesn't work out too
well on my amd64 Gentoo system). And then my Windows workstation also
gives me problems because xsltproc is less stable on Windows than it
is on Linux.

That last paragraph is just a long way of telling you I don't have any
good looking PDFs + source to show you unless you are willing to wait
for me to execute half my build script on Windows and the second half
on Linux. Even then, there would still be the weird table captions
problem with DocBook 5.

I would be remiss to not mention dblatex.

On 9/19/06, Jon Leech <jon@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
>     A standards group I work with (Khronos) is interested in migrating
> to Docbook as the basis for our future specification documents. To do
> that, we'll need to be able to author complex technical specs including
> considerable amounts of imbedded math and diagrams, and generate PDF out
> the back end.
>
>     I've been through a bunch of the FAQs and howtos, but have not been
> able to find a clear answer of how we'd go about this. My preferred path
> would be using imbedded MathML, as we are already using Docbook 4.3 +
> MathML -> XHTML + MathML for man pages and it's working well. But I'm
> not sure of the state of MathML->PDF support in e.g. FOP.
>
>     So, to get to the point - can anyone point me to examples of
> documents and toolchains for Docbook+MathML -> PDF documents, that I
> would be able to download and build myself on both Fedora Core 5 and Win
> XP? I'm really hoping to be able to locate an actual document I can
> experiment with - email explanations are not necessarily easy to
> translate into practice. It would be a big plus if the example uses only
> toolchain components I can get prepackaged for FC5 in RPM form.
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     Jon Leech
>
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-- 
http://chris.chiasson.name/