Gemse Approach 1: An editor for Presentation and Content MathML

Gemse Approach 1 is an editor for mathematical formulas using Presentation or Content MathML. Unlike other editors, this one is neither intuitive nor easy to learn and you must have a basic understanding of MathML. It is controlled with the keyboard only, its user interface is highly inspired by the text editor vi. The goal is to be able to edit equations as fast as possible.

Gemse Approach 1 is implemented in JavaScript using DOM. It runs in the webbrowser Firefox 3 and in XULRunner 1.9.

Gemse finally has become a useful tool. The most important features have been implemented. However, the newest version still is not a production release, its intention is only to get feedback from interested users.

The current release is 1.0.11. Read the release notes or the documentation.

Download and install

You can choose from the following variants:

• If you are using Firefox 3, try the online demo.
• Install Gemse as Firefox extension. Then you can open it by visiting chrome://gemse/content/editor.xul and read its documentation at chrome://gemse/content/doc/index.xhtml.
• Get Gemse as XULRunner application and run it with XULRunner 1.9.
• Use the minimal version with less weird directory structure, intended to be run outside of Firefox chrome, like the demo. Just unzip it and open editor.xul in Firefox. (If you do that, not all commands will work since Firefox prevents access to your system.)
• Get the whole source. (As tar ball, since the directory structure I use for development makes use of symbolic links.)
• Clone the git repository from http://www.andonyar.com/rec/2008-12/gemse/repo/gemse_public.git

Important: Loading and saving of equations has been reimplemented in the latest release, so it may be buggy. Please be careful and make a backup of your document before you edit it with Gemse. Also, please report any misfeatures back to me. However, if you use the demo or the minimal version, you are on the save side, since Firefox prevents access to your system.

Bugs and more Help: Trac site

If you want to learn more about Gemse than the documentation bundled with Gemse can teach you, take a look at Gemse's Trac site. There you can also send in bug reports.

What it is and what it is not

Gemse is an interactive editor for Presentation MathML, completely steered by keyboard. But let us look at that a bit more detailed:

Presentation MathML

• is too verbose to edit using a text editor
• represents nicely the structure of a formula
• is adapted to be used on the web
• is by far not as powerful as LaTeX, since it is not a typesetting laguage
• does not encode the meaning of a formula, just its appearance
• uses Unicode (so, no need to include some stupid package just to get that character)

Content MathML

• represents the meaning of a formula, not its appearance
• can be automatically converted to Presentation MathML in most situations, given there are useful notation definitions
• can be cumbersome to edit by hand, since you easily loose the overview. Gemse helps here a little.
• is very similar to OpenMath

Gemse

• is completely controlled by keyboard, a mouse is useless
• is similar to Vim
• uses Mozilla (only runs in Firefox 3 or higher at the moment)
• is not mature, as it is a young project
• is fun

Roadmap

For the 1.0 branch, all planned features have been implemented. From now on, only small things will be added and bugs will be fixed. Some of them are

• Fix saving and loading of files
• Add important commands, mainly to the insert modes
• Add a way to load external notations for NTNView

For the 1.1 branch, the following is planned:

• Improve speed by checking out the following ideas:
  • Change the style sheets such that the matching of the rules is much quicker
  • Try to do the construction of the views in parallel, using threads
  • Instead of recreating the internal datastructures of the views from scratch, just change what needs to be changed
• Support for command line arguments
• Reimplement undo/redo
• Drastically improve code quality

Licence

Gemse is licenced under the GPL Version 3 or later. You can get information about this license on the GNU website. A copy of the license text is shipped together with Gemse.

If you like to have different license terms, please contact the author. Gemse depends on libraries licenced under the GPL, so these dependencies have to be removed if you want to distribute Gemse under another licence.

Relevant Literature

You can find a list of relevant literature on Gemse's main page.

The Author