Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: XSL implementation of DBTeXMath

[Jirka Kosek <jirka at kosek dot cz>]

Michael Smith wrote:

> ...I guess maybe you can infer that the DocBook TC intended the
> contents of <alt> to be a *human-readable* text description, using ISO
> entities for any math symbols that couldn't be represented with normal
> characters.

Yes, I know. But even with ISO entites and lots of parenthesis you
aren't able to express many basic equations (matrixes, integrals, ...).
Thus you are unable to create nonvisual alternative for equation and
no-human can read it. If you use TeX, you can describe even complex
equations and at least TeX-able people can understand it. Mathematical
papers are red by mathematicans and they ususal know TeX.

I know many people who would like use DocBook for his single-sourcing
capabilities, but they also need an easy way (ie. not MathML;) of
inserting equations. It is better to provide some common hack for them
then forcing them to create their own hacks over and over again. 
 
> But maybe if you use <alt role="tex">, you could tweak the stylesheets

This sounds reasonably for me. Stylesheets can interpret alt as TeX only
when the role is set to TeX. Thus it will be always clear if there is
plain-TeX version or TeX version of equation. 

				Jirka

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
  Jirka Kosek  	                     
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
  http://www.kosek.cz