Thoughts on LibreOffice Math

[Michael Meeks]

On Thu, 2013-07-04 at 18:10 +0200, Frédéric WANG wrote:
> I think the visual rendering can be preserved when converting from 
> StarMath to MathML, but the other direction is not possible since 
> StarMath does not have all the MathML features.

	Right; well - I guess a one-shot move to MathML would need backing up
with an alternative 'as good as we can do it' StarMath version.

> I think enabling the visual editor by default is indeed important. What 
> is blocking it from going out of experimental features? I think the GSOC 
> student who worked on that mentioned some crashes and I can try to debug 
> and fix them. Are there other serious bugs / missing features apart 
> undo/redo?

	There was one ergonomic issue that Regina didn't like IIRC, but nothing
major no - it's a crying shame that 95% of the work was done to enable
it, but not the last bits :-) Also - wrt. undo/redo - IMHO serializing
the entire formula state (ultimately just a string) and a cursor
position on each keystroke would be a reasonably trivial sledge-hammer
solution ;-)

> Gecko has an editor but it currently does not know anything about MathML 

	Ok :-)

> I think LibreOffice people just want basic math support 
> without too much interaction with the other features of the rendering 
> engine (although at least integration in the surrounding text is 
> important).

	Sounds sensible.

>  I admit that I didn't check GtkMathView in details, but it 
> seemed to be a small piece of code that is designed to be integrated in 
> other applications and interactive edition is possible. The rendering 
> did not seem so good to me (a font issue on my system?) but that would 
> be better if Khaled adds Open Type MATH support.

	So - I guess if GtkMathView is MPLv2 and doesn't require glib/gtk
+/pango etc. I see no real problem with that :-) I wonder if we can get
some shared layout core - or if it's tied hard to pango (I'd assume so).
Failing that, I'd love to see more LibreOffice code in a form that is
re-usable in gtk+ apps - perhaps we can do the pluggable-ness inside
libreoffice for that ? or ...

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot