LITERAL: A SIMPLER MATH NOTATION EDITOR FOR THE INTERNET © 2002 Eugenio Vilar This text was prepared with Literal, a visual editor for multilingual and scientific expression over the Internet. It runs on PC's under Windows 9x. Examples of multilingual text Não morrerá sem poetas nem soldados a língua em que cantaste rudemente as armas e os barões assinalados. (M. Bandeira) Was sich überhaupt sagen läßt, läßt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muß man schweigen. (L. Wittgenstein) 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. (L. Carroll) Citoyens, je viens, au nom du Comité d'Instruction publique, soumettre à votre discussion un travail sur l'ère de la République, que vous l'aviez chargé de vous présenter. (G. Romme) Most languages written in the roman alphabet, corresponding national keyboard layouts, are supported. Examples of math notation
The whole greek alphabet is available, plus many algebraic symbols. Entering math is done by typing, rather than picking. Examples of simple diagrams
The preceeding flowchart describes the transformation of visual input into Html. I would like to emphasize that this text looks essentially the same on both Literal's screen and on a browser's. Literal produces the necessary minimum Html for a decent, plain rendering of our ideas. It concentrates on what Html lacks: a literal notation for math. From then on, we may either send the result directly for browsing, or use a Html editor to enhance it. For this document, I have used Literal itself to apply a few tags. Text structure A text is a sequence of lines. The user chooses which lines the browser should display as text, which ones it should draw as images. Literal handles image lines and leaves the rest to the browser (and to an optional Html editor). Image and text lines are separated as follows:
For text areas, multilingual support is such that the appropriate ISO character set is automatically selected according to the keyboard. Technical remarks Literal is a small efficient graphics program disguised as a text editor with an extended character set. It produces Html plus the Javascript code that will actually render inline bit-mapped images on the client. Bulky image data is not transferred and does not reside in any remote server. We don't have to upload text, just send it as e-mail attachment. Literal is not needed at the receiving side. So far, I have successfully used Netscape Navigator 4.x and Internet Explorer 5 and 6 to browse Literal's output. I have also sent and received the same as e-mail attachments. Unfortunately, the Microsoft browser displays fast but ignores printing Javascript-generated images. Netscape 6 and Mozilla owe us support for xbm. Legal notice
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