STEM Support in the DocBook Toolchain

If you’re using the dblatex pipeline to produce PDF, the DocBook toolchain provides built-in processing for LaTeX and MathML notation. If you write your STEM expressions using the latexmath notation, you’re all set. But that only gets us half way. What if you write STEM expressions in AsciiMath? The pipeline does not understand AsciiMath, but it does understand MathML. And that’s something the DocBook converter can produce. If you have the AsciiMath gem installed, the DocBook converter will translate AsciiMath to MathML. That means when you’re using this pipeline, you can write STEM expressions in both the AsciiMath and LaTeX notations.

If you’re using the fop pipeline, the STEM support provided by the DocBook toolchain is more spotty. This pipeline does not support LaTeX notation at all, and there’s no library that integrations with Asciidoctor like AsciiMath to convert LaTeX notation to MathML. So you cannot write STEM expressions in LaTeX when using this pipeline. If that’s important to you, consider using the dblatex pipeline instead. There’s still a path for writing STEM expressions in AsciiMath. If you’re running the DocBook toolchain using Java, you can configure the JEuclid integration (by activating the JEuclid FOP plugin) to get MathML support. That means we can turn again to the AsciiMath gem when converting to DocBook. The DocBook converter integrates with the AsciiMath gem, if available, to convert the AsciiMath notation to MathML, which the fop pipeline can understand.