JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

Background / Context  

MathTran: Translation of mathematical content as a web service is a technical project to solve some problems that stand in the way of handling mathematics in electronic media. It opens up pedagogic possibilities. At present, the problems are being solved in a patchwork of piecemeal ways. This project helps unify print and electronic approaches.  

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to provide a web service that translates mathematical content from a substantial and useful subset of LaTeX to MathML and vice versa, and to several graphics formats. The new software that does this will be packaged for deployment on other web servers. Together, this will make it easier for other systems to cope with mathematical content.

The specific objectives are to:

• Use TeX for mathematical typography
• Use TeX to parse LaTeX input
• Harden TeX to meet web server security constraints
• Run TeX as a daemon, to remove its long startup time
• Translate LaTeX to and from MathMLTranslate TeX’s output to PNG, SVG, EPS and PDF using existing open source programs 

Project Methodology

This project will produce open source software, mostly written in the Python scripting language, to meet a number of clearly specified technical goals. Its main purpose is to integrate existing technologies related to web services, web pages and mathematical content. Where appropriate, agile programming methods will be used.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

The main deliverables are:

• Mathematics translation available as a web service, up to July 2008
• Open source software that implements this mathematics translation

The main consequences are: 

• Unification of the various ways of dealing with mathematical content
• Other software will be able to access TeX mathematical typography
• More communication and sharing between authors of mathematical content