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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Fwd: Re: A long way to go
From:       Andrea Rizzi <rizzi () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-05-20 12:19:35
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Ops, I CCed this message to kde-core-devel instead of koffice-devel...


----------  Messaggio inoltrato  ----------
Subject: Re: A long way to go
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 08:48:16 +0200
From: Andrea Rizzi <rizzi@kde.org>
To: Ulrich Kuettler <ulrich.kuettler@mailbox.tu-dresden.de>, Claus Wilke 
<wilke@caltech.edu>
Cc: kde-core-devel@kde.org


Alle 23:37, sabato 19 Maggio 2001, Ulrich Kuettler ha scritto:
> Hi,
>
> after a first reading of the famous TeX Book chapters (thanks to Claus) I
> feel the strange desire to improve kformula. But which way to go?
>
> Philosophic
>
> There are two possible ways. First we have the typesetting. If we want to
> be good at it, we will need to implement as much of TeX's ideas as
> possible. And second there is the user interface to mathematical
> applications. (Think of MathCAD as a bad example.) I wanted to do one of
> those in the first place. An octave frontend or something the like. Mainly
> because I knew typesetting would be hard.
>
> The difference, as I see it, is simple. The user interface is about
> communicating the meaning of a formula to the machine. A typesetting system
> only cares about the look. Kformula as it stands right now was designed
> with the user interface idea in mind (even though Andrea always wanted a
> typesetting system).
>
> Actually the question isn't whether we want typesetting or not. We have to
> give the user a way to play with his formulae. But I don't think of
> kformula as a drawing tool. It's the meaning that matters most. (Honestly,
> I don't expect anybody to use kformula to typeset books.)

KOffice need a formula editor (in the typesetting meaning). Maybe it will not
be used to write books but it may be used for simpler things. Also consider
that you can write with kword+kformula and than export to latex for nicer
printing.
A frontend to octave already exists and work quite well but need a lot of
improvements, its name is kmathplot (actualy it is a frontend for the
plotting functions but may be extened). It already is a KPart and  it could
be integrated in koffice quite easly. I think we can contact the authors and
ask them to put it in CVS may be renaming it KMath or KMathlab instead of
kmathplot. This tool is in my opinion necassary also because kchart(AFAIK) is
not able to plot anything (i.e. X<->Y graph) and I'll never use kspread if I
have no way to plot my data.

We can also use libkformula in kmath(lab) to display nicerformula but we
still need something to draw quite nice formulas.
May be nobody will write a book with koffice but someone may need to write
articles or reports and I see noway to write a Math or Physics report/article
without a formula editor. Note that, at least here in italy, the
mathematician and physician community is a relevant part of the linux
community.

As usual before this summer I have no time and so I have no way to do
anything of this ideas :-(

> Current issues
>
> There are some problems right now. The AA bug. And printed formulae look
> ugly, especially brackets. We will have to calculate our positions with
> much higher precision. I just don't see how to do this. Most of our values
> come from QFontMetrics. And we only get pixel values out of them. Any
> ideas?
>
> This is somewhat urgent as we need to provide a working version soon.

Maybe latex fonts looks nicer did any of you try to use that fonts ?

Bye
Andrea


--
Registered Linux User No.71426  |     ***  KDE Project  ***
        Andrea Rizzi            |  http://www.kde.org/
mailto: Andrea.Rizzi@sns.it     |  http://i18n.kde.org/teams/it
        rizzi@cibs.sns.it       |  Projects: i18n,KOffice,KBabel
        rizzi@kde.org           |  Italian translations coordinator

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