OK, so I realise nobody else gives a damn, but it's frustrating the hell 
out of me. All I want to do is convert a tiny, minute, small, simple, 
little, trivial, diminutive, insignificant little formula into MathML. I 
have just spent literally an hour trying to achieve this tiny task, and 
so far have failed miserably. I can't find any web page anywhere on the 
face of the Internet that will perform the trivial conversion required 
for me.

Wolfram have a page that will turn a Mathematica expression into MathML. 
But there isn't any way of writing the construct I want in Mathematica.

The first hit from Google is this:
http://www.orcca.on.ca/MathML/texmml/textomml.html
This is THE EXACT THING THAT I WANT. So imagine my utter rage that IT 
DOESN'T ACTUALLY WORK! >_<

I also found this:
http://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/drw/lm.html
This works, BUT... I still cannot ACTUALLY VIEW THE MARKUP. I can make a 
web page, put some LaTeX markup in it, and load the page, and Firefox 
displays it correctly. However, it WILL NOT show me what MathML has 
actually been generated. It only shows me the source code it loaded from 
disk, not what it was ultimately transformed into.

At this point, it seems that the only option I have left open to me is 
to spend 4 days reading through the incomprehensible MathML spec 
document. All so that I can convert a piffling 3 characters into MathML...

(I wouldn't mind, but I don't even know if using MathML will actually 
fix the problem anyway!)

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Invisible wrote:
> This works, BUT... I still cannot ACTUALLY VIEW THE MARKUP.

So add a button you can click when it's done to dump out the DOM that the 
javascript created.  That'll be a good oppotunity to learn javascript and 
DOM processing.

(Or take a look at it in firebug or something?)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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>> This works, BUT... I still cannot ACTUALLY VIEW THE MARKUP.
> 
> So add a button you can click when it's done to dump out the DOM that 
> the javascript created.  That'll be a good oppotunity to learn 
> javascript and DOM processing.

I guess I could do... It's just intensely frustrating when I wanted to 
just quickly test something and I end up having to spent an hour or so 
coding, testing and debugging something. I am literally astonished that 
there isn't a website that will just *do* all this for you. It's not 
exactly a complex transformation, it's just difficult to do by hand...

> (Or take a look at it in firebug or something?)

Never heard of Firebug. However, I just installed it, and in about 20 
seconds flat I got what I wanted.

If only I knew about this thing sooner...

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Heh, I've never seriously tried to use MathML before. On the plus side, 
it does solve the problem I had (i.e., various math symbols have Unicode 
codepoints, but don't exist in any known typeface). On the other hand... 
it's a tad verbose.

With TeX, if you want to write "x" as a mathematical variable rather 
than a piece of text, you simply say "$x$". But by the power of MathML, 
if you want to do this in DocBook, you write

   <inlineequation>
     <math xmlns="http://www.w3c.org/1998/Math/MathML">
       <mrow><mi>x</mi></mrow>
     </math>
   <inlineequation>

which is somewhat more typing. There's probably some trick that removes 
the need to keep typing in the XML namespace URL every time, but even 
then you'd still have

   <inlineequation><math><mrow><mi>x</mi></mrow></math><inlineequation>

which is a lot of typing considering that only one single character of 
that will appear in the final output.

Now I see why people like to use specialised editors to write this 
stuff. ;-) Typing HTML by hand is trivial, but this stuff is just 
mental. (!)

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Invisible wrote:
> Never heard of Firebug. However, I just installed it, and in about 20 
> seconds flat I got what I wanted.

Glad to have helped!

> If only I knew about this thing sooner...

You don't write much complex javascript, is all. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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>> Never heard of Firebug. However, I just installed it, and in about 20 
>> seconds flat I got what I wanted.
> 
> Glad to have helped!
> 
>> If only I knew about this thing sooner...
> 
> You don't write much complex javascript, is all. :-)

Oh, only a Mandelbrot plotter and an LZW demo and a Huffman 
encoder/decoder and...

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Invisible wrote:
>>> Never heard of Firebug. However, I just installed it, and in about 20 
>>> seconds flat I got what I wanted.
>>
>> Glad to have helped!
>>
>>> If only I knew about this thing sooner...
>>
>> You don't write much complex javascript, is all. :-)
> 
> Oh, only a Mandelbrot plotter and an LZW demo and a Huffman 
> encoder/decoder and...

It's not complex javascript until you start dicking with the DOM. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

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>>> You don't write much complex javascript, is all. :-)
>>
>> Oh, only a Mandelbrot plotter and an LZW demo and a Huffman 
>> encoder/decoder and...
> 
> It's not complex javascript until you start dicking with the DOM. :-)

...and how do you think the Mandelbrot plotter, you know, plots? :-P

(I got the trick from Slime, by the way.)

Also, my cubic equation solver works by basically opening a new frame 
and dynamically generating the entire content that should go in there. 
(I don't even remember how now...)

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On 7/7/2010 11:41 AM, Darren New wrote:
>> Oh, only a Mandelbrot plotter and an LZW demo and a Huffman
>> encoder/decoder and...
>
> It's not complex javascript until you start dicking with the DOM. :-)
>

I would think that a Mandelbrot plotter, an LZW demo and a Huffman 
encoder/decoder would be a /lot/ more complicated than anything you 
could do with the DOM.


-- 
http://isometricland.com

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On 7/7/2010 8:20 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Now I see why people like to use specialised editors to write this
> stuff. ;-) Typing HTML by hand is trivial, but this stuff is just
> mental. (!)

I wish it were suipported by browsers though. I've got a handful of 
equations scattered around my website, and it would make the equations 
look a little flashier than plain text.


-- 
http://isometricland.com

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