The European Mathematical Trust (EMT)

The EUROMATH project was funded through the SCIENCE programme of the European Union and administered through the European Mathematical Trust based at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.

EUROMATH is a project to enhance research support for european mathematicians and to stimulate interchange among them by creating a research environment based on modern information technology. The project aims to produce both software and services.

the EUROMATH software is a homogeneous working environment adapted to the needs of the mathematician. The system is designed to incorporate an editor capable of handling mathematical documents, access to mathematical databases, an electronic mail interface and computer algebra capability.

Mathematical notation is essential to mathematicians for conveying ideas. However formulae were not constructed with typesetting and printing in mind and cause a number of problems when they are represented in or via electronic media.

It is desirable that mathematical notation be displayed by an authoring system in such a way that during editing their appearance is the same as that seen by the reader. It is also desirable that their elements can be easily manipulated by the author, so that they may be edited if required.

A number of text editing systems are available which encode mathematical notation. In most of these formulae are represented as an encoded string and the appropriate typesetting language must be learned in order to create them. Creating or altering formulae can be a tedious process as the strings must be edited and then viewed. Altering a formula may necessitate several iterations of the edit/preview cycle. The LaTEX system, much used for typesetting by mathematicians exhibits these disadvantages.

Most popular text editors hardly handle mathematical notation. The only way of including anything more complex than very simple formulae in documents is to first executed the formula as a graphic which is then included in the text. Needless to say the only method of editing a formula in these circumstances is to recreate or alter the graphic.

EUROMATH is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor with powerful mathmatics facilities, which include two methods formulae preparation. During editing, formulae are displayed on screen as they would appear on the printed page. The elements of a formula may be manipulated - moved, added or removed, and the result seen immediately by the author. Formulae can be constructed by selection from symbol palettes or, importantly, input as a LaTEX string and instantly converted to appear on screen in their final form. Changes can be made by directly manipulating the symbols or by swiftly converting the formula into a LaTEX string and editing that.

The EUROMATH Editor is a structured editor which encodes documents in Standard Generalised Mark-up Language (SGML). The essence of a structured document is that the various structural elements (title, paragraphs, headings, etc.) are predefined for each type of document. In SGML these structural rules are described in the Document Type Definition (DTD) and each document created must comply to a set of structure rules in a DTD. For example a letter DTD might define that there must be an author and recipient's address before the salutation (Dear ....). The author's address could be defined as containing several elements in a predefined order, some of which may be optional (name, house name, street name, area name, city name, code, country). In theory this makes the document completely portable between different SGML editors as long as the document includes the DTD and both editors have access to a set of rules for handling these elements.