0.5 The Mathdox Player is a piece of software that allows you to view Mathdox documents in a web browser. For more information about Mathdox documents click here.

Installation of the Mathdox Player consists of a number of steps. First you have to make sure that a number of software packages are already installed on the system where you wish to deploy the Mathdox Player. Next, you need to download and configure the Mathdox Player itself. Finally, you can deploy the Mathdox Player. These steps are described in more detail in the sections below.

Before you can install the Mathdox Player, you need to make sure that the following is installed on your system: A Java Development Kit. We recommend Sun's JDK version 5.0 or newer which can be downloaded at: http://java.sun.com/j2se/downloads/ A servlet container. We recommend Apache Tomcat version 5.0 or newer which can be downloaded at: http://tomcat.apache.org/ Apache Ant. We recommend version 1.6.5 or newer which can be downloaded at: http://ant.apache.org/

The Mathdox Player can be downloaded here: mathdoxplayer-${version}.zip Unzip the downloaded file in a location of your choice.

Before you can deploy the Mathdox Player, you need to change at least one configuration parameter. After unzipping the downloaded mathdoxplayer-${version}.zip file, you should end up with a file mathdoxplayer/configuration/properties.xml. This file contains the following section: ]]> The most important part of this section is the oxf:/player/manual part. This is the location where the player will look for Mathdox documents to display. By default it is set to the location of this manual. If you want the player to play the Mathdox documents in the directory /home/mark/mathdox on your local filesystem, then you can replace oxf:/player/manual by file:/home/mark/mathdox. Or, if you use Microsoft Windows and want to play the Mathdox documents in the directory C:\Documents and Settings\mark\mathdox, you can change it into file:/C:/Documents and Settings/mark/mathdox. Note that you have to redeploy (see next section) the player each time you change the configuration. It is also possible to let the player play Mathdox documents that are stored in an XML:DB compatible database, such as eXist. For this to work, you need to replace oxf:/player/manual by the XML:DB URI of your database. For instance, for a local installation of eXist, this would be xmldb:exist://localhost:8080/exist/xmlrpc.

After changing the configuration such that the Mathdox Player knows where to find your Mathdox files, you need to run ant in the mathdoxplayer directory (it is assumed that Apache Ant was installed beforehand). This will create the mathdoxplayer/build/war/mathdoxplayer.war file that you can deploy in the servlet container. For tomcat this means that you can simply copy the mathdoxplayer.war file into the webapps directory of your tomcat installation. The Mathdox Player should then be available at http://localhost:8080/mathdoxplayer.

The following problems are known to exist in this version of the Mathdox Player. Files with names that contain spaces or other 'unconventional' characters are not displayed. This appears to be a bug in the xforms handling code of Orbeon Presentation Server 3.5M1. OpenMath and MathML expressions that are embedded in an <xforms:label> tag (for instance to produce a radio button choice between a number of mathematical expressions) are not displayed correctly. This appears to be a problem in the xforms standard (markup is not allowed in an <xforms:label> tag). It may take ant a long time to compile the mathdoxplayer.war file. This is mainly due to the fact that approximately 20.000 font files from jsMath need to be included in the war file.