<title>Converting poorly typed math</title>
<p>When converting keyboarded inline math to XML, typically some manual cleanup is required to overcome authors who are either lazy or creative typers. Consider the character &#x00B1; (plus-minus, U+00B1). It is all too often entered as an underlined plus symbol, <underline>+</underline>. Once, we saw a paper written by a scientist who knew a minus sign was different from a hyphen but could not figure out how to insert the symbol, so he typed an underscore character and applied superscript formatting!</p>
<p>Improperly typed math may look similar to its semantically correct counterpart, but the difference between plus-minus and an underlined plus is important when the characters are published in XML. When the XML is then converted to text by text-to-speech or text-to-braille accessibility devices, the resulting equation is described inaccurately or nonsensically.</p>

<title>Converting text equations to XML</title>
<p>Text equations can be transformed from Word DOCX format to JATS XML. These keyboarded equations can be treated as plain text; for example, the expression
<disp-formula id="e"><italic>x</italic> &#x2208; [10,350]</disp-formula>
can be simply transformed to
<preformat>&lt;italic&gt;x&lt;/italic&gt; &amp;#x2208; [10,350]</preformat>
in JATS. Both &lt;disp-formula&gt; and &lt;inline-formula&gt; allow Unicode text and font face changes, so this could also appear as
<preformat>&lt;inline-formula&gt;&lt;italic&gt;x&lt;/italic&gt; &amp;#x2208; [10,350]&lt;/inline-formula&gt;</preformat>
or, correspondingly,
<preformat>&lt;disp-formula&gt;&lt;italic&gt;x&lt;/italic&gt; &amp;#x2208; [10,350]&lt;/disp-formula&gt;</preformat>
if it is a display formula. Text conversions such as these can be done by extracting the document.xml fragment of a DOCX file and then applying an XSLT transformation to create JATS XML.</p>