Dadzilla - A MathML browser for Arabic mathematical presentation

Dadzilla
A MathML browser for Arabic mathematical presentation

Dadzilla allows using MathML for Arabic mathematical presentation. In this presentation, Arabic mathematical expressions use specific symbols and spread out from right to left.

Installation:

Dadzilla is an adapted version of Mozilla.

Dadzilla 1.1 is based on: (Mozilla 1.5.1 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5.1) Gecko/20031207) for Linux.

To download Dadzilla 1.1: click Zip

The Dadzilla 1.2 is based on: (Mozilla 1.6b Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20060228) for Microsoft Windows.

In this version of Dadzilla, already existing MathML elements can be used for both Latin and Arabic mathematical presentations after specifying the environment by a single attribute. The problems met in the previous version are solved. In particular, the choice of fonts in order to have the two mathematical presentations (Latin and Arabic) in the same document is resolved. The use of the element <rl> introduced for the specification of RTL direction is not necessary anymore. However, the specification of the attribute dir="rtl"in <math> element is needed.

The mathmled mathematical expression editor has been integrated after its adaptation for Arabic mathematical presentation.

In the future version of Dadzilla, some improvements should be made. In particular, using stretched Arabic alphabetical symbols, like sum and product.
Some localization improvements can also be projected for mathmled and Dadzilla.
The text that appears in dialog boxes, menu, toolbars and button labels can be translated to Arabic.

To correctly display MathML documents in Arabic presentation, some fonts must be installed:
- acmsy10: Mirrored BaKoMa Computer Modern font cmsy10.
- acmex10: Mirrored BaKoMa Computer Modern font cmex10.
- aramzarab: adapted Arabic mathematical symbols font RamzArab for Dadzilla.

These fonts can be downloaded from: here

In Mozilla, to obtain good MathML Latin Presentation rendering appropriate fonts, such as those in the BaKoMa Font Collection, are necessary.

The BaKoMa Computer Modern fonts could be used and downloaded from: here

The mathmled is a MathML Editor for Mozilla from Steve Swanson at MacKichan Software, Inc.

mathmled is implemented in JavaScript and XUL which runs in Mozilla 1.2 and later versions.

The mathmled 0.4.5 has been adapted to work with Dadzilla for editing Arabic Mathematical expressions.

mathmled can be used trough the button Math in the standard toolbar:

or in the Tools menu in Web development:

mathmled can be called whenever the user wants to insert a mathematical expression in HTML or XHTML documents. HTML or XHTML documents can be created using Mozilla Composer or any other editor.

To download Dadzilla 1.2: click Zip

The Dadzilla 1.3 is based on Dadzilla 1.2 with an Arabic interface.

To download Dadzilla 1.3: click RAR

Quotation: 1 2

Contributors: Mustapha Eddahibi and Azzeddine Lazrek.

Bibliography:
* Azzeddine Lazrek, Mustapha Eddahibi, Khalid Sami, Bruce R. Miller, Arabic mathematical notation, W3C Math Interest Group Note, 2006
* Mustapha Eddahibi, Azzeddine Lazrek and Khalid Sami, Arabic mathematical e-documents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Verlag, Volume 3130, pp. 158-168, 2004
* Mostafa Banouni, Mohamed Elyaakoubi and Azzeddine Lazrek, Dynamic Arabic mathematical fonts, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Verlag, Volume 3130, pp. 149-157, 2004

Acknowledgements:
Roger B. Sidje, G. Sergiu Gabriel Paul Dumitriu,
David Carlisle, Max Froumentin, Paul Libbrecht, Bruce R. Miller, Robert Miner and the others members of the W3C Math Interest Group,
Mostafa Banouni, Mohamed Jamel Eddine Benatia, Mohamed Elyaakoubi, Khalid Sami.

Multilingual scientific e-document processing Project
Azzeddine LAZREK
Address: Cadi Ayyad University, Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science
P.O. Box 2390, 40 001 Marrakech, Morocco
Phone: (212/0) 5 24 43 46 49 Fax: (212/0) 5 24 43 74 07
E-mail: lazrek@ucam.ac.ma
URL: http://www.ucam.ac.ma/fssm/rydarab

Last modification: 17.03.2008.