[oXygen-user] Feature request: MathML support for equations

[Sorin Ristache]

Hello,

Yes, a future version of Oxygen will offer support for editing MathML 
equations in the Author mode (CSS-driven tagless editing).

There is a plugin for DITA Open Toolkit called Plus:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/files/Demos/

which adds SVG rendering for MathML to the XHTML output, the HTML Help 
output and the Eclipse Help output generated with DITA Open Toolkit. It 
does not add the MathML content to the PDF output. The SVG images should 
not have the scaling problem of the GIF images that you use now. I tried 
to integrate it in the DITA-OT distributed with Oxygen but I could not 
do that yet because it seems it requires more than the usual steps for 
integrating a DITA-OT plugin. It does not come with documentation for 
the DITA developer yet but you can ask for help on the dita-users 
mailing list if you want to use MathML content rendered as SVG images in 
the output of DITA-OT before we integrate this plugin in Oxygen. The 
creator of the plugin is Deborah Pickett which is very experienced in 
using and customizing the DITA-OT:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/


Regards,
Sorin


Gabrielle Burns wrote:
> Does oXygen have plans to incorporate support for MathML in the near future?
> 
> We are currently using Oxygen 9.2 to create CHM (HTML Help) and PDF output
> from the same files, based on DITA. Our source files (XML) currently include
> over 200 equations. We create the equation files in MathType using its
> MathML 2.0 translator setting, and save the equation files to GIF. This
> approach renders a less than aesthetic equation output, either in the CHM or
> PDF output. We have to apply a scaling attribute to the equation image in
> the XML file to reduce the large equation sizes in PDF.
> 
> If oXygen users have suggestions for rendering equations in CHM and PDF
> using DITA, these would be welcome. Thank you.
> 
> Gabrielle Burns
> Lead Information Products Developer
> BRO Software Applications
> Breault Research Organization, Inc.
>