CAMEL, the Cardiff Maths e-learning project¶

1 person project for now
CArdiff Maths E Learning project -> CAMEL
Cardiff Uni is mostly old school - print, mark with pen and paper
on web, mostly latex -> PDF - very static
typesetting - glyphs, fonts, Donald Knuth, TeX, LaTeX
LaTeX documents are not “well formed” (closing tags etc)
but LaTeX is excellent for equations
until recently HTML wasn’t great - but now MathJAX, which renders latex into nice equations in HTML
MathJAX does fonts and characters, but doesn’t do structure
so can we take Latex and convert to mix of HTML and mathjax
can then embed homework into pages
wrote a cutom parser, using a subset of latex
equations left inside <jax> tags, but structure converted into HTML
use django-mptt for tree of chapters, pages etc (efficient retrieval and slow insertion, move etc)
models subclass mptt.models.MPTTModel - trees auto-update ...
provides nice templatetags and filters
demo how to put lists in for homework -> HTML form
free text box - make edit with latex format, update to show in page

All looks very nice.

Q - what happened to MathML A - MathML is unreadable (too verbose - see e=mc2) while latex can be read, so mathjax is better