Thoughts on LibreOffice Math

[Frédéric WANG]

I'm not an ODF/ODT expert but AFAIK these formats are just zip archives 
of XML documents. Try to save a file in ODT/ODF with LibreOffice and 
change the extension to .zip to see what I mean. In particular, you'll 
find some "content.xml" files inside that are just MathML documents. So 
basically XML import/export of MathML is already done somewhere in 
LibreOffice since it is how ODF/ODT are designed.

Whether LibreOffice (or other programs) can handle arbitrary read/right 
of MathML is another story. As I said, LibreOffice Math is currently 
centered around its internal StarMath syntax. Some information are 
currently lost when exported to MathML (that's what I'm trying to fix) 
and some information are lost when imported from MathML (because 
StarMath is less expressive). LibreOffice cheats a bit by putting the 
StarMath source in an <annotation> element when exporting to MathML and 
by reading this source again when importing MathML. What I'm suggesting 
is to work directly on the MathML representation in the long term so 
that import/export is straightforward and no information will be lost. 
It will still be possible (and desirable) to use StarMath or other tools 
to generate MathML code, though.

> Would a direct XML export be supported in ODF and thus usable in other
> programs that read/write ODF files? I am not sufficiently familiar with
> the ODF standard to know.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Andrew Pitonyak
> My Macro Document:http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
> Info:http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php