Keyboarding Frege's concept writing

Abstract

Gottlob Frege’s 1879 book Begriffsschrift (Concept Writing) poses a number of problems for the would-be digitizer, most notably its extensive use of a two-dimensional notation not easily reduced to a linear sequence of characters. With careful study, however, the notation can be seen to possess a clear internal logic, and an easily keyboardable serialized form for data capture can be designed, which makes it easy to transcribe even complex formulas. Invisible XML supports the key step of parsing that data capture format and turning it into usefully structured XML, from which routine stylesheets can generate SVG images of the two-dimensional formulae and other useful outputs.