Outline Project Description
This is technical project to solve some problems that stand in the way of handling mathematics in electronic media. It opens up pedagogic possibilities. At present, the problems are being solved in a patchwork of piecemeal ways. This project helps unify print and electronic approaches.
There are three major standards for mathematical content, namely the open source program TeX for mathematical typography, and LaTeX and MathML for plain text representation. Also, there are many graphics standards in which mathematical formulae can be represented.
This project will provide a web service that translates mathematical content from a substantial and useful subset of LaTeX to MathML and vice versa, and to several graphics formats. The new software that does this will be packaged for deployment on other web servers. Together, this will make it easier for other systems to cope with mathematical content.
TeX will be used for mathematical typography (selection of font and size for characters and symbols, and their placement and spacing) and for the parsing of LaTeX input. Existing open source tools will be used to generate graphics from TeX’s typeset output.
The project makes an important technical innovation, which is to ‘harden’ TeX so that it is sufficiently secure for deployment on a mainstream web server. It also relies on two existing innovations. The first is to use TeX to parse LaTeX encoded data, without also executing it. The second it to run TeX as a daemon. These innovations are of value in their own right, and this project can be thought of as a demonstrator for them.
For more information, read the project proposal (PDF, 117Kb).