Saturday, April 17, 2021

Re: Editing mathematics documents

On Sat, Apr 17, 2021 at 3:43 PM Julius Hamilton <julkhami@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a question related to editing documents inside Vim. If anyone might have any tips, I'd really appreciate hearing them.
>
> I'd like to edit PDFs which contain mathematical symbols, not to publish the papers myself, as I could with Latex, but just as a form of note-taking.
>
> I'm curious, could Vim open a PDF as raw textual data? Or is the source text of a PDF sealed off, and inaccessible?
>
> And if it could, could it support mathematical formula? Not as a markup language, but as a kind of textual object you could actually stick the cursor into and manipulate a bit, such as extracting the top of a quotient and putting it somewhere else, or an expression to the right of an integral symbol, for example.
>
> Or, is there any tool that could do this? Perhaps Emacs?
>
> Thanks very much,
> Julius

IIUC PDF files are like books, not meant to be edited (which is one
reason while enterprises use them: to avoid text counterfeiting).
Again IIUC, it is possible to edit them by using the appropriate Adobe
tool, which is not for free, but even with this tool you may need to
know the edit password set by the file's creator.

OTOH, for simple mathematical formulæ (in ordinary text) you may want
to install Dr. Chip Campbell's math menu & keymap
http://www.drchip.org/astronaut/vim/#MATH ; and for complex formulæ
you may want to use one of the flavours of the Teχ language — maybe
XəTeχ which is Unicode-aware and can write PDF but IIUC not read it.
In HTML, I think you could also avail yourself of the MathML language
(which can be embedded in HTML), provided that the target browser(s)
can decipher that.

Best regards,
Tony.

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