[tex4ht] teilatex and teimlatex

[William F Hammond]

Zdzislaw Meglicki <zdzisiekm at sbcglobal.net> writes:

>> What do you mean by DTD XML? All the standard XML data files follow a
>> DTD (document type definition).
>
> This is what Tralics papers say and then add "similar to TEI XML". Perhaps
> there are some more relaxed XMLs around that are not DTD. Or perhaps
> theirs is a unique XML that is similar to TEI and also DTD compliant. 
> Something like this, I guess.

I cannot parse the phrase "dtd xml".  I expect that both tralics
and LaTeXML have their own xml document types.  An XML document type
may be defined by a DTD or by what is called a schema.  Essentially
it is a markup vocabulary not unlike LaTeX with rules for what can be
used where.

Also it seems that Connexions has its own xml document type.  For this
see http://cnx.org/content/m9000/latest/ My guess is that this
document type provides the source language for what appears online at
Connexions.

> Here's my salesman pitch: on-line education is coming. It's become a
> hot issue in the US already with top universities actively
> engaged. So we need TeX to produce XML (or HTML5 at the very least)
> and it needs to be done by TeX itself, that is, from within the
> official TeX distribution suite.

Yes, this is an important distinction.  It is too restrictive to
insist that a TeX engine do all such processing.  But given that one wants
LaTeX source -- or at least LaTeX-like source -- it would be good if
there was TeX community maintenance and sponsorship.  (Again see my
TUG 2010 talk about LaTeX profiles.)

> The approach taken by Tralics and LaTeXML is to work from the LaTeX source
> and convert "the meaning" of constructs encountered to XML/MathML. 
> But for this to work, there must be a special substitute for every LaTeX
> package included in the source. The resulting conversion may break
> on silly things like, say, direct TeX commands, for example LaTeXML 
> does not know about "\mathinner", so I can't include the braket package.
> Tralics alters TeX semantics in subtle ways, e.g., with equation numbering
> and references, and with spacing around brackets.

Exactly.  For a given suite of documents one needs a fixed list of
commands, but it would be too much to ask for an all-encompassing
universal list of commands.

> To convert from dvi instead can give the system more flexibility, and 
> we already have dvipdfm and similar example applications that show
> how to read the file and how to construct the output in, say, page
> description language such as PDF. And this is exactly what TeX4ht
> is trying to do, so it looks like a good way forward.

Not really.  Tex4ht DVI files are very non-standard.  Standard DVI
admits translation only to printer or printer-like languages.

                                    -- Bill