[kde-edu]: Math formats in KDE Edu

[Alexander Rieder]

On Monday 07 June 2010 22:00:13 Aleix Pol wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been chatting with a high school teacher discussing how can we use KDE
> Edu to teach math in schools (since it's both our fields).
> He created some very nice class where he guides the student for one hour
> explaining some basic math properties using KAlgebra, of course this is not
> ready for use yet but it's a start. The idea is to distribute during the
> class directly these documents to the students so that they can work
> themselves with our software. Ideally different teachers will be able to
> contribute new documents and share themselves content, thus win-win-win
> situation.
> 
> I think that we all agree that it is a great way to work until here.
> Problems:
> - We don't have a good place to share that kind of stuff.
>   -> I'm not sure KDE Files fits our needs. It's not free, it's
> centralized, I'm not sure it's easy to contribute incrementally.
>   -> we could consider using wikis but they are hard to integrate with our
> software
>   -> we could do something ourselves but that means work
>   -> we could use anything I don't know of, so please help :)
> - We should introduce translation of such content, that leads me to the
> next point.
> - Formats are totally fragmented.
>   -> Cantor worksheets use rich text format which is fine but generating
> .pot files from that and new cws sounds hard because it's not just plain
> text. (Albert? any hint)
>   -> If we propose to use ODT, which is the sanest format in my opinion, we
> are disabling teachers to use Cantor to create the classes. Is it possible
> to export Cantor worksheets to ODT?
>   -> Does anybody know how hard would it be to make ODT translatable?
>   -> Does anybody have a better solution than those?

Hi,
Cantor doesn't use richtext format. It uses a custom file format (I know thats 
bad).
It basically is a zip file containing all the images contained (as png, jpg or 
eps files) and a content.xml that is a Cantor specific XML file binding it all 
together. I also would like to note that Cantor will soon gain the ability 
have Worksheet Entries that are entirely Rich Text, so we will have to store 
that one too.
Exporting to ODT is not supported, but in the 4.5 version rudimentary export 
to LaTeX  as well as plain text(e.g. to use as a script file) is possible.

So far the situation on from a Cantor Point of View.

best regards,
Alexander