Oxygen XML Forum

Hi,

We use a customized DITA framework and want to add MathML support. I've already tried adding adding the DTD, MOD, and ENT files from the mathml DITA-OT plug-in to our customization along with referencing them from our customized topic DTD but I'm not sure that this is the right approach. Any pointers welcome.

TIA
Frank

Hi Frank,

If it helps you, the DITA OT distribution which comes with Oxygen contains a mathml plugin inside it which you could use as a starting point:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\frameworks\dita\DITA-OT\plugins\mathml

besides contributing XSLT for publishing PDF and XHTML-based topics with the equations embedded the plugin contributes a new Public ID for a DITA composite-type topic which can contain inside it the equation wrapped in two DITA specialized elements, an equation element which extends DITA fig and a mathml element which extends DITA foreign.

You can create in Oxygen using the File->New dialog a Composite with MathML file and see that in action.

Regards,
Radu

Hi Radu,

Thanks for the pointers.

PDF transformation
Actually, I already had a look at the mathml plugin and the additional document type. But because we don't want to create a separate document type I copied over the files from the mathml plugin to our own DITA-OT plugin and integrated them into our DTD. This does work already in oXygen and the files validate but the PDF transformation still breaks because of some unresolved references. So I suppose I should have a closer look at the XSLT files from the mathml plugin to see how the MathML is rendered in the PDF.

Multiple MathML plugins
In addition, I had a closer look at the DITA-OT plugins and found that there is also a MathML plugin for DITA4Publishers (net.sourceforge.dita4publishers.math) which comes with two additional document types, mathml2 and mathml3. There I stumbled across the following comment in mathml2.dtd:

<!-- WEK:
Removed use of public identifier here to ensure that we always
get this version of the mathml2-qname-1.mod and not one
from another source, especially in tools like OxygenXML
where there could be any number of copies of MathML
referenced from different catalogs.
-->

So which is the plugin with the most current implementation of MathML? And which files should I reference?

Kind regards,
Frank

Hi Frank,

The Oxygen provided mathml plugin does not come with MathML DTDs.
Instead, its modules refer to it using the public ID -//W3C//DTD MathML 2.0//EN.
Also the catalog.xml from our plugin has an entry like:
which means that we wanted the XML catalog from the "mathml" framework we bundle with Oxygen to be actually used to resolve that public ID.
What MathML 2 DTD gets used in the end I'm not sure, it depends on the order of the catalog entries in the catalog-dita.xml. It probably does not matter much though.

Regards,
Radu

Hi Radu,

Many thanks for this explanation, that will help me a lot.

Kind regards,
Frank