DOCBOOK: Entities for Math

[Fredrik Svensson <fred@ludd.luth.se>]

Hi,

I have in a document needed to include some mathematical notations,
related to sets.

This document is more of a DEK way of describing a programming problem,
and also its solution, with code. Programming and mathematics sometimes
goes hand in hand. I missed the Q,R and Z notations for rationals, reals
and integers, so I added them by doing the trick below.

These are already defined in MathML as far as I understand, only talking
about charentities here, and should not be a problem to add in DocBook ?
or maybe they are left out for some reason, anyway the simple trick below
will help people with the same problem..

http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/chapter6.html#chars_entity-tables

ISOMFRK Mathematical Fraktur
ISOMOPF Mathematical Openface (Double-struck)
ISOMSCR Mathematical Script

My temporary solution was :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
          "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"; [
<!ENTITY Qopf "&#x0211A;"> <!-- DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Q, rationals -->
<!ENTITY Ropf "&#x0211D;"> <!-- DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL R, reals     -->
<!ENTITY Zopf "&#x02124;"> <!-- DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Z, integers  -->
]>
<article>...</article>

===

The HTML output works fine in Mozilla, but these fancy mathematic symbols
together with other symbols like &beta; are lost in the pdf generated by
Fop.
This is a problem of Fop, but has anyone here overcome this problem ?
I read briefly about fonts on
http://xml.apache.org/fop/fonts.html
but not sure what fonts needs to be added..

I might stick with the HTML output for now even if it hurts.. :) at least
the symbols are there..

===

Anyone working with the MathML module that have some tips on writing
equations ? My current equations are not that hard and superscript and
subscript with entities goes a long way :)
The DocBook book only sais MathML Module FIXME: write this section :)
No rush for me, just interested if someone has some pointers.

/Fred