MAD: a flexible system for authoring mathematical documents

MAD (Mathematical Abstract Document) is a document preparation system integrated with MAPLE. MAD provides a simplified model for describing a collection of logically structured documents with mathematical content. MAD also provides routines for manipulating the data structure that represents such documents and for exporting this data structure into standard formats, such as IbTEEX, PostScript, PDF and HTML. Integrating MAD into a computer algebra system such as MAPLE brings the following original features: 1) the automation of the computation and of the typesetting of mathematical formulae, graphs and tables; 2) the automation of the building of documents thanks to the underlying programming language. The system MAD was created in order to generate the interface of the Encyclopedia of Special Functions (ESF, h t t p : / / a 1 go . i n r i a . f r / e s f) [2]. The ESF is an automatically generated encyclopedia, where all mathematical formulae and graphs are computed by generic algorithms. The ESF can be compared up to some extent with the Abramowitz and Stegun's Handbook of Mathematical Functions [1] and the DLMF project 2. This kind of mathematical document sets the following requirements for it to be easily used: pretty display (human readable format) and semantics (machine understandable format) of the mathematical formulae, cross references for browsing and quoting, paper version in several formats. The system MAD is designed to automate the edition and the production of such mathematical documents.