From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Mon Mar 25 2002 - 17:56:47 EST
On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 23:30, Bruce Koehn wrote:
> Abiword could become the darling of the scientific world
> if it could handle mathematical notation in a manner similar
> to TeX.
>
> 1. The scientific world, especially those funded by grants, avoid
> using MS-Word because it isn't free. So compatibility with MS-Word
> is a non-issue (or at least not an important issue).
>
> 2. The very low cost of Abiword is attractive to poor scientists.
>
> 3. Cross platform compatibility would make life much easier since
> such a variety of platforms are used in the scientific world.
>
> 4. Internationalization is another driver because scientists tend
> to communinicate internationally.
>
> 5. Except for mathematical constructs, TeX and LaTeX are difficult
> to use well. Merging the best of Abiword and TeX makes sense.
>
> 6. XML would be apealing to many scientists who prefer the ability
> to use a text editor for much of their authoring work.
>
> I don't know if XML has tags for producing mathematical text ala
> TeX but such tags should not be hard to define.
Just to remove any confusion, XML is a generic stuff. You can do
virtually everything in XML: drawing, preference files, text layout,
text content, programming, RPC, maths. XML is just a way to format those
descriptive data. Read XML does not mean "I understand any XML file".
Yes, this feature is planned, but a post 1.0 release, don't know which
one. And we don't know yet how it will be done.
Hub
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