Projects/Edu/mathMLRender

The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

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