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Strategies for Parallel Markup

Cross-referenced parallel markup for mathematics allows the combination of both presentation and content representations while associating the components of each. Interesting applications are enabled by such an arrangement, such as interaction with parts of the presentation to manipulate and querying the corresponding content, and enhanced search indexing. Although the idea of such markup is hardly new, effective techniques for creating and manipulating it are more difficult than it appears. Since the structures and tokens in the two formats often do not correspond one-to-one, decisions and heuristics must be developed to determine in which way each component refers to and is referred to by components of the other representation. Conversion between fine and coarse grained parallel markup complicates ID assignments. In this paper, we will describe the techniques developed for \LaTeXML, a \TeX/\LaTeX to XML converter, to create cross-referenced parallel MathML. While we do not yet consider \LaTeXML's content MathML to be useful, the current effort is a step towards that continuing goal.