Re: [Texmacs-dev] LatexML

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Bas Spitters wrote:
> I wondered whether anyone has looked at latexml.
> It might also be(come) a helpful tool for latex importation into texmacs???
>
> Bas
>
> From http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/LaTeXML.html:
> For many, LaTeX is the prefered means for document authoring, particularly
> when significant mathematical content is involved. On the other hand,
> content-oriented XML is an extremely useful storage format allowing 
> documents
> to be used, and reused, for a variety of purposes, not least, presentation on
> the Web. Given the rough mismatch between the two, particularly for
> mathematics, conversion from LaTeX to XML is a bit tricky. Faced with this
> situation, and the lack of other suitable tools at that time, the Digital
> Library of Mathematical Functions proceeded to develop thier own tool,
> LaTeXML, to fill this need. This document describes a preview release of
> LaTeXML.
>
> The idealistic goals of LaTeXML are:
>
>     * Faithful emulation of TeX's behaviour.
>     * Easily extensible.
>     * Lossless; preserving both semantic and presentation cues.
>     * Uses abstract LaTeX-like, extensible, document type.
>     * Determine the semantics of mathematical content (Content MathML, Good
> Presentation MathML, eventually OpenMath).
>
> As these goals are not entirely practical, or somewhat contradictory, they are
> implicitly modified by “as much as possible.” Completely mimicing TeX's
> behaviour would seem to require the sneakiest modifications to TeX, itself.
> `Ease of use,' of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Few documents are
> likely to have completely unambiguous mathematics markup; human understanding
> of both the topic and the surrounding text is needed to properly interpret
> any particular mathematical fragment. Thus, we expect that document-specific
> declarations or tuning to be necessary to faithfully convert mathematical
> documents, rather than presuming to provide a `turn-key' solution. At the
> same time, we would encourage a more content-oriented mathematical markup
> style, than a presentation-oriented style.

Yep, we should keep an eye on this.
It might enable us to produce more reliable converters in the future,
even though the LaTeXML guys will already have a hard to make them nearly
as good as they already are in TeXmacs...