Extension:Math/Roadmap

Introduction
The extension math i.e. the rendering of the tag has a long history. It was modified by a lot of different people with different ideas and programming styles. Moreover the technology has changed during the past years.

As a result the extension i.e. its implementation shows that the Math extension is rather a grown structure than a well designed and documented extension.

An overview and a demonstration about what is possible to do with this extension is to find at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula

The aim of this page is to coordinate the development activities concerning this extension.

Wanted features

 * MathML support
 * Spcefification of the subset of commands that are allowed "MediaWiki uses a subset of AMS-LaTeX markup, a superset of LaTeX markup which is in turn a superset of TeX markup, for mathematical formulae"
 * Automatic testing
 * Security stategie
 * Links to formula (in the current development version $parser->nextLinkID is used to generate an anchor id, which is not human readable. The problem is that the same TeX string can occur more than once in page.)

Current activities
Currently the following changes are being reviewed https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:open+project:mediawiki/extensions/Math,n,z

Future steps
Integrate LaTeXML to enable MathML The current status of this implementation can be followed at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/extensions/Math.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/LaTeXML

As a fist demo. Rendering all wikipeida pages that contain math can be tested at.

Currently there are only 8 of 284303 equation that can not be rendered. As soon as this problem is solved a testrun within the wikimedia foundation is desired.

Feature Requests
3840 Looks for high math images printing. The only thoughts I have here are to switch form dvipng to dvisvg and use svg images which would look better at all scales and hopefully would print better. Related 15777

4915 This bug looks to tweak the size of the images produced by texvc. I think this should simply be a WONTFIX. While it may look nice on his browser, at some scale. The real issue is to get the fonts of the math and the surrounding text to match. That would be a lot f work to make texvc do something like that. Mathml/Mathjax are better suited to these tasks.

5856, 10186 and 6722 are related to mhchem package. Users seem to be very interested in this. Perhaps this should looked into.

12223 Desperately needed and long overdue inline math tags. Probably would only make sense if base line issue is sorted out. Should we use a slightly smaller font for inline math? Not done in latex but may look nice on the web.

28258 It would be nice to have some commutative diagram packages. xy-pic may be a good option.

HTML Rendering
1594 Change the way - is rendered in HTML. Complication unary vs. binary minus are spaced differently, and not currently distinguished by texvc because automatically handled by LaTeX.

25645 Suggests we need a better algorithm for deciding about which mathematics is not render-able as HTML. Makes a good point, but rather nebulous and requires some thought.

10434 Don't italicize variables, but mark them as variables in HTML. Low priority, as it has no visible impact in most setups but is mostly a matter of "doing it right".

11663 Problems with &rho; on safari browser, upstream seems to be a wontfix, actually it seems more of a "we do it right". Low priority.

Backwards compatibility issues
31442 Should be fixed now. Some non-standard LaTeX and AMS-LaTeX work under texvc. Must be careful not to break texvc features.

Security and Misc
6248 Permissions issues on some machines. Very old bug, not sure if it still an issue. Not clear which configurations should be tested to confirm/reproduce.

Visual Appearance Issues
15777 I have to agree this looks fairly bad. Curious if switching to dvisvg would straighten this out.