[XeTeX] Word 2007 Math

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 30 mai 06 à 09:31, Hans Hagen a écrit :

> [...]
>
> so, instead of focusing on what we don't like about ms office math, we
> should look at where the strong points of (future) tex's lay and  
> how we
> can let those worlds work together

Agreed! The only thing that worries me a bit is that I would have  
preferred to see this happen with OpenOffice, say, rather than MS  
Office, and with the OpenDocument format (an approved ISO standard)  
rather than Office Open XML (a competing, not yet approved, submitted  
ISO standard).

OpenOffice has the add-on OOoLaTeX <http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net/ 
 >, but this add-on is basically including every mathematical  
character or equation as a graphics and thus is more of a short-term  
hack than a long-term viable solution. It's more or less the same as  
what Apple's iWork users (including me) do in Keynote when using a  
LaTeX-based external equation editor such as LaTeXiT <http:// 
ktd.club.fr/programmation/latexit_en.php> and the Keynote LinkBack  
plugin <http://commons.ucalgary.ca/~king/projects/keynoteplugins/ 
linkback/>.

A significant player is this area should also be Wolfram Research (a  
driving force behind MathML if I'm not mistaken), with its Publicon  
mathematical publishing system <http://www.wolfram.com/products/ 
publicon/>, also based on XML. I did not look in detail, but it seems  
Publicon is essentially the mathematical typesetting capabilities of  
Mathematica with a different user interface.

Finally about the future of TeX, I feel actually the same as you:

> De : Bruno Voisin
> Date : 16 mai 2006 13:54:31 HAEC
> À : TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List
> Objet : Rép : Going beyond TeX (was Re: [OS X TeX] Using OTF-fonts  
> for TeX)
>
> Le 16 mai 06 à 13:39, William Adams a écrit :
>
>> Actually, it's very important to realize that TeX in-and-of-itself is
>> firmly rooted in an old-style of text handling, and while there have
>> been really amazing projects extending it (Omega, pdftex, XeTeX)
>> there are a lot of fundamental architectural difficulties (see a
>> recent thread on this on usenet:comp.text.tex, also the recent
>> discussion of LaTeX font warnings on the XeTeX list and the
>> pointlessness of a utfenc.def file for XeTeX).
>
> Agreed! My impression (keep in mind I'm not especially competent on  
> these matters) is that TeX will have at some point to catch up with  
> SGML and its derivatives (XML, HTML, MathML, etc.), and of course  
> with Unicode, in order to merely survive. XeTeX and Omega are  
> certainly important steps towards Unicode. I hope LaTeX will  
> provide bridges towards SGML input and output; ConTeXt possibly  
> does already, I cannot say as I haven't found the time to try it yet.
>
> FWIW,
>
> Bruno Voisin

Bruno Voisin