Re: [boost] Reference documentation: one approach

From: William E. Kempf (wekempf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-29 12:29:40

Neal D. Becker said:
> I agree that LaTeX is a good choice.  The problem with DocBook/XML is
> lack of any reasonable way to express mathematics.  There is a MathML,
> but it is immature, not widely supported, and not intended to be
> read/written by humans.

Again, I'm no expert here, but...

1) MathML is a W3C standard at revision 2.0, so I wouldn't consider that
immature.

2) The markup is ugly, but decipherable.  If you use a tool to create the
equations, such as WebEQ (http://www.dessci.com/), there's not much of an
argument left to say about human consumption.  (And reference entities can
be used to make the round trip bearable.)

4) In general, Boost documentation doesn't require much, if any,
mathematical equations that aren't readily represented in plain text.

5) We have this issue today with HTML documentation.  Not a reason to not
consider a solution that handles this, obviously, but it points out that
it's not that large of a factor for Boost documentation.

-- 
William E. Kempf