Projects/Edu/mathMLRender

This page will summarize ideas about creating MathML rendering and editing widget for KDE. There are several approaches to create such widget:

Implement MathML support for WebCore

From #webkit: "making WebKit do some minimal MathML rendering is probably a rather quick project, making a complete MathML renderer is probably not. building an editor on top of WebKit (or any other rendering engine which can display mathml) is probably not a very short project either. fixing up WebKit so that when it's in editing mode it knows how to edit mathML is also not a short project"

Props

• All WebCore-powered browsers will benefit from this
• MathML will be naturally integrated into HTML widget

Cons

• WebCore is too heavy for some applications which just need to show a formula or to show many formulas in different widgets
• WebCore may be not suitable for applications which want to embed the formula in something else
• WebKit is not a Qt/KDE dependency yet.

Separate KFormula code into shared library

Rendering code in KFormula does not heavily depend on KOffice libs and can be separated from it.

Props

• Sharing code with KFormula
• Formula editor can also be taken from KFormula

Cons

• AFAIK KFormula code is not strictly MathML-specific, it just can import and export to MathML
• KFormula has its own DOM model
• We don't know how difficult can be the port from KOffice

Implement QT backend for GtkMathView

GtkMathView has clear backend/engine/frontend separation, backend for QT and frontend for QT DOM can be easily implemented. Dependency on GTK is optional so it won't be a problem.

Props

• Very easy to implement
• More code sharing - more testing, more developers
• QT-style DOM for MathML can also be easily implemented

Cons

• Formula editor will be slightly harder to implement
• "Gtk" in the name, but I think we can live with it ;-)
• We add a dependency to KDEEdu/KDE (or wherever this code would sit)

Other possibilities and thoughts

• Maybe we should create it for khtml first and then port it to webkit (that mostly depends on how kde is going to deal with them)
• Maybe we could create a library that can be used from khtml/webkit and also that we can use to create the mathml expression editor widget