Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Reduce math rendering preferences 2

BlahTeX with SVG rendering or MathJax

3
Nageh (talkcontribs)

Both BlahTeX with SVG rendering and MathJax are sensible options. The former would imply server-side rendering, and would/could resolve many current issues such as pixelated fonts, missing baseline settings, and font scaling with user/browser preferences. It is supposed to have better HTML/text and MathML output capability than texvc. However, additional intelligence in the server-side processing would be needed to tell apart display math from inline math tags. Moreover, automatic adaptation to the surrounding text size in a HTML document (e.g., in References, which are often in smaller font) may not be feasible. MathJax relies on JavaScript-based client-side rendering, would also resolve these issues, and additionally supports automatic text size adaptation and copy&paste. It has wide browser support and is actively developed.

Both options would not be fully compatible with the current texvc rendering, which is because texvc is quite loose in the parsing of TeX and accepts constructs that are invalid in TeX or (most) (AMS-)(La)TeX document classes. Furthermore, texvc implements a set of non-TeX symbols (inclusive typos). However, with some additional coding effort for backwards compatibility with texvc and some user efforts it should be doable to get it right in the end (as done in part in my mathJax user script front-end).

Salix alba (talkcontribs)

When we first started thinking about BlahTex many years ago, we did have a major effort by wiki-project mathematics to clean up the tex input and fix inconsistencies which didn't render correctly in BlahTex. Things like having a raw % sign in math tags which is illegal latex but texvc allows. w:User:Pfafrich/Blahtex en.wikipedia fixup documents some of this effort. Members of the project were very good and helping with this clean up.

Nageh (talkcontribs)

Thanks, that link is quite useful for tracking down some incompatibilities between MathJax and texvc.

Reply to "BlahTeX with SVG rendering or MathJax"