Formatting mathematical articles with XSL FO
Tuesday, 30. May 2006, 13:51:52
Basically I consider myself to be among XSL Foe's rather then XSL FO users, however I am really curious about possibility of rendering maths with XSL FO and since XSL community does not care much about issue, I decided to write appropriate style sheets myself. Generally speaking capabilities of XSL FO 1.0/1.1 are sufficient to format most of mathematical expressions including fractions, indices, matrices, under scripts, radicals etc.
There are some problems with over scripts however and it seems that rendering over scripts with complex base is quite tricky so current style sheet assumes that base of expression with over scripts is simple (#PCDATA).
As it was expected situation with XSL FO implementations is not perfect either, currently most of XSL Formatters including RenderX XEP and Apache FOP do not support fo:inline-container needed to format complex inline expressions, Xinc seems to implement fo:inline-container but fails to align it properly, so at the moment only Antenna XSL Formatter can handle fo:inline-container properly. It is not the problem as long as my interest is purely academic and I am unlikely to use XSL FO in real life. Some examples of formatting mathematics in XML + XSL framework are posted on my site.
There are some problems with over scripts however and it seems that rendering over scripts with complex base is quite tricky so current style sheet assumes that base of expression with over scripts is simple (#PCDATA).
As it was expected situation with XSL FO implementations is not perfect either, currently most of XSL Formatters including RenderX XEP and Apache FOP do not support fo:inline-container needed to format complex inline expressions, Xinc seems to implement fo:inline-container but fails to align it properly, so at the moment only Antenna XSL Formatter can handle fo:inline-container properly. It is not the problem as long as my interest is purely academic and I am unlikely to use XSL FO in real life. Some examples of formatting mathematics in XML + XSL framework are posted on my site.