Cranach

The project aims to develop a scientific document system which works out-of-the-box for rapid slideshow preparation and presentation.

It's designed mainly for Math and Science educators already well-versed in LaTeX.

It has the following components:

1. An lightweight XML-based document format (referred to as "cranach"), which aims to store both presentational and semantic information.

   • Actual presentation is controlled by a separate XML stylesheet which is included in Item 3 (see below) or may be custom-provided.
   • It aims to support direct inclusion of HTML5 elements.
   • It aims to support direct inclusion of MathML elements, both presentational and semantic.

2. A scripting language (called "wb") which facilitates the creation of cranach files.

   • It is expected to readily accept LaTeX math typesetting commands and raw html elements.
   • Its syntax is designed to be easily mastered by users already moderately-versed in LaTeX.
   • Each wb file has no preamble, so multiple files may be concatenated seamlessly to form a larger wb file.
   • Each theorem-like statement is assigned an MD5 key generated from its content to facilitate labelling and referencing.

3. A frontend web-browser-oriented presentational system.

   • It supports keyword/theorem/section hyper-referencing.
   • It features an Ace editor so users may directly render wb code to cranach and simultaneously to the browser frontend.
   • Users may export cranach file to LaTeX with a click on a button.
   • It has preliminary support for rendering latexml documents.
   • A significant portion of the frontend is devoted to presenting slideshows.

The project currently works on browsers with XSLTProcessor support, such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.