[kde-edu]: Math formats in KDE Edu

[Inge Wallin]

I have cross posted this to kde-edu and koffice-devel. 

To KOffice people: This is originally from a thread in the kde-edu ML 
regarding storage of math lessons created by a teacher.  A suggestion turned 
up to store them in odt, and a short discussion ensued about that.

To kde-edu people: I added the Koffice people in this discussion because it's 
relevant to both.  I'm sure we can help each other out for this.  KOffice has 
some libraries that will make it much easier to create the odt from scratch or 
from  a document template, and the viewing technology that can be included as 
kparts into other applications.

On Monday, June 07, 2010 22:40:51 Alexander Rieder 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.
> 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.

I have read all mails in this thread and have chosen this one to reply to.  
Please consider it as a reply to the thread rather than to the parent.

There is something called MathML, which is an XML based format to encode math, 
both for typographical and semantic needs.  These two uses have slightly 
different tags and attributes even if they share a common ground. It is a 
standard format and I strongly recommend that you use it for your math needs.

If you want to export something to odt (opendocument text) and embed math 
inside it, this is done using a subset of MathML.  KOffice implements this in 
the form of the so called Formula Shape.  Unfortunately it's not very well 
developed yet but it does exist and it can show at least simple formulas quite 
well already.

KOffice also implements a couple of vector formats and many bitmap formats, 
and if you want to create graphs and embed into the documents that would be 
supported too.

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

And another one from the KOffice point of view. :-)

	-Inge