EMS Newsletter June 2010 - European Mathematical Society ...

Zentralblatt MATHMLized
Patrick Baier, Olaf Teschke
1. What for?
MathML 1 (Mathematical Markup Language) is an XML
application to describe and display mathematical content
on the Web. The current standard 2.0 was defined in 2001.
With the release of the first version as a W3C recommendation
as early as 1998, it may be fairly considered as a
Methusalem by Web measures; but only recent versions
of the most common browsers support the MathML
standard.
Old Zentralblatt interface: Bulky tex code.
There are several reasons for this rather slow progress.
Mathematics content might not have been considered
to be commercially interesting by browser developers.
Mathematicians were early adopters of the Web, relying
on the established TeX/LaTeX formats. Enhanced display,
if considered to be necessary, was usually obtained
by small solutions like conversion of elements to html if
possible (e.g. subscript and superscript) or the integration
of small formula images; alternative formats (dvi,
ps, pdf) were often provided for convenience. In general,
mathematicians were quite satisfied with the language
they were used to and didn’t care too much about presentation.
Moreover, the conversion of the existing TeX/
LaTeX corpus to MathML is non-trivial and is an ongoing
challenge (probably, no one would like to create the
XML directly).
However, with the progress of Web mathematics
– and especially its interactive components – the ad-
Zentralblatt Corner
vantage of a common XML standard becomes more
evident. Mathematical software is widely used and it is
obviously useful to have a common interface with Web
presentations. Apart from the enhanced readability, automatic
processing is supported. Search and retrieval of
mathematics content can be enhanced significantly. As
a small but important example, MathML makes mathematics
content barrier-free: visually impaired users may
access formulas via standard screen-readers.
2. How does one convert (masses of)
TeX/LaTeX?
When you set up a mathematics blog today, it is usually
not much effort to install MathML via available plugins.
Even converting older content can be done with a
reasonable effort, given that a single user won’t change
New Zentralblatt interface: Direct MathML display.
his (La)TeX environment too frequently. However, a
digital library or mathematics database may face difficult
problems in the conversion of existing content.
There may be a large variety of styles and macros, even
a change in TeX/LaTeX standards. Though many approaches
exist for the conversion, there is no general
optimal solution and one will need to check which existing
tool may be the most convenient solution for a
specific problem.
There is limited data available for the comparison
of the existing tools. H. Stamerjohans et al. (2009; Zbl
1 www.w3.org/Math/
EMS Newsletter June 2010 55