Happy Summer from #rdcHQ! The MathML Track is working remotely this week and we’re deep in research mode with an emphasis on technology and tools.

We made our first foray into MathML with MathML Baby Steps. Essentially, we used this exercise to compare several WYSIWYG editors that are available (focusing on open source), and we actively tested Amaya (W3C), BlueGriffon (Gecko), Hermitech Formulator and fMath which has a fairly active development hub at Google Code. fMath is interesting and under active development, but it lacks documentation and has usability issues on the Mac platform (which we plan to submit to the development team). It also might be more technology than we need to learn to author the equations for our project, but we have it bookmarked for future reference. We should also note that although BlueGriffon is open source, the MathML equation editor requires the purchase of a commercial add-on.

It does appear that Amaya is a winner in terms of usability and clear documentation that explains how to author equations. Our approach will probably involve a combination of hand-editing (which is always a good skill to have) and WYSIWYG tools. We also found A Gentle Introduction to MathML by Design Science to be an indispensable user guide, as the MathML 3.0 spec is quite technical and geared towards developers authoring editors and browsing tools as opposed to writing equations.