[kde-edu]: Math formats in KDE Edu

[Alexander Rieder]

On Monday 07 June 2010 23:21:08 Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:40 PM, Alexander Rieder
> <alexanderrieder at gmail.com
> 
> > wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Well, that means we could "easily" export some .pot for translation, no?
The way this is currently handled is that all the Text-Entries are stored in 
the content.xml inside of <TextEntry> text. So if someone who has some script-
foo can extract that, it should be possible. This is also a good idea as 
translating other things (esp. the commands) is bad.
But i don't really know enough about how the whole translation things work, so 
if theres any way to make things easier, please enlighten me.

> 
> 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.
> 
> Is there any reason for not using ODF standards instead of our proprietary
> format? do you plan on iterating on that?

The reason it is that way at the moment is simplicity. It allows to only store 
the necessary things, in a way easily parseable for the app.
I don't know enough about ODF to decide if it is possible to use it for saving 
everything in a convenient way. (e.g. we need to store the name of the used 
backend, all the different entries, that either contain only richtext, or are a 
pair of command and result etc.). If it is possible to use ODF for it, i think 
it would be great to make use of it. If not it's probably the best to 
implement a export to ODF function, that will export all the information to a 
nice looking document, but that will  not be able to be opened by Cantor 
again.

> why using LaTeX?
That is a presonal preference. I just love LaTeX, and needed the export 
feature for university. But I agree that it is probably not the way to go for 
sharing the documents.

> Don't you think having cantor as a free math contents hub would be really
> nice?

Of course that would be awesome. I really hope we can make something like this 
happen.

regards,
Alexander