Extension:Blahtex/Bugs/Bugs in blahtex itself

Here is where to report bugs in the blahtex software itself.


 * The old version of this page is at Extension:Blahtex/Bugs and feature requests.

\mathcal broken for digits and lowercase letters

 * Reported by: Salix alba 19:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Status: workaround present in blahtex 0.4.2

Description
Things like \mathcal{123abc} which look like $$\mathcal{123abc}$$ on wikipedia cause an error message on blahtexwiki (see http://wiki.blahtex.org/index.php?title=Help:Formula).

Solution
Blahtex 0.4/0.4.1 is not able to translate such things into mathml because it doesn't know TeX's weird character mappings; it just bails out with a parse error. The behaviour in blahtex 0.4.2 has been modified; now it lets this go through to PNG generation, but still does not produce MathML output. So when we first deploy, at least equations using such \mathcal hacks won't completely die.

This should not be a significant problem in future, because commands will be added to blahtex's vocabulary which render such \mathcal hacks unnecessary. At such a stage we'll probably go back to making it a parse error again. Dmharvey 03:47, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


 * A different way round the problem is to use standard symbols for the mathcal characters. For example \mathcal{1} $$\mathcal{1}\;$$ gives the same symbol as \infty $$\infty\;$$, alternatives to some of these can be found at w:User:Pfafrich/Blahtex_all_commands. --Salix alba 12:58, 14 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately we can't fully implement salix alba's solution yet. For example, texvc doesn't recognise "\surd", but the symbol for "\surd" is accessed several times in wikipedia via some mathcal (or maybe mathbb, I can't remember). But yes, certainly it will work for lots of them. Dmharvey 13:17, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Broken MathML characters

 * Reported by: Salix alba 19:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Status: not actually a bug in blahtex

Description
Translations of \biguplus, \bigsqcup, \bigoplus, \bigotimes, \bigodot don't appear correctly.

Solution
I believe the translations are correct; the problem is with the fonts. There's nothing I can do about this directly now. When the STIX fonts become available (any day now...) these characters will hopefully be ok.

Possibly incorrect MathML character for \models and \Game

 * Reported by: Salix alba 19:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Status: open in blahtex 0.4.1 -- waiting for further advice

Description
Blahtex 0.4.1 maps \models to unicode character 0x22A7. (MathML character chart). I chose this one because its name is "models". However, a case could be made that 0x22A8 is a better choice ("vDash" or "DoubleRightTee"), even though the MathML character listings call that one "TRUE". Waiting for advice from a model theory/logic person to tell me what to do. Dmharvey 03:47, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Similarly, \Game is mapped to 0x2141. On the Unicode listings this is called "game" (see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2100.pdf). As Salix alba points out, this character doesn't look right. I'm not sure what to do about this one. I have no idea what $$\Game$$ is used for, and I don't know what it should get mapped to. Dmharvey 03:47, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

\color doesn't work

 * Reported by: Salix alba 19:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Status: fixed in blahtex 0.4.3

Minor spacing bugs

 * Reported by: Salix alba 19:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Status: ignored for the moment.

Description
\lim, \liminf, \limsup, \min, \max, \inf, \sup, \gcd, \Pr, are converted to limn where I think it should be limn which renders with an extra space, see. --Salix alba 14:01, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Solution
I'm sticking with , because it's recommended in the MathML spec. The real issue is the browser's spacing decisions here, perhaps via its operator dictionary. Blahtex has a "strict spacing" mode where it overrides the browser's decisions by using explicit spacing markup. We've now switched to strict spacing on blahtexwiki, so we can concentrate on other things. The only downside is that the mathml output is more bloated. Dmharvey 20:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

\mod and \pmod

 * Reported by: --Salix alba 11:32, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Description
\mod - $${x}\mod{y}{z}\;$$ and \pmod - $${x}\pmod{y}{z}\;$$ seem to render with a lot of space, in both tecvc and Blahtex.


 * I believe this is about the same amount of space that appears in LaTeX itself. If you expected less space, try perhaps "\bmod": $${x}\bmod{y}{z} \,\!$$. Oooh that's broken in texvc. I think I saw that on bugzilla in the last few weeks actually, I think someone fixed it, but the fix might not be deployed yet. Dmharvey 13:21, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Not working latex

 * refactoring of this section in progress ...  Dmharvey 03:47, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

In Help:Formula the following bug were found
 * \iiint (OK in Mozilla, not in IE+MathPlayer)
 * \iiiint
 * \epsilon (OK in Mozilla, not in IE+MathPlayer)
 * \big( \Big( \bigg( \Bigg( give same size delimiters in IE+MP, fine in Mozilla

--Salix alba 19:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing these out. Obviously you went to a lot of trouble to test everything. A few comments: Things like \mathcal{a} and \mathcal{1} I probably don't plan to support (in the near future anyway). All of these symbols should be accessible by ordinary latex commands anyway, so there's no reason to support them. (Well maybe some really weird ones, but who uses those... tell me if you think of any that someone might want which don't have a latex command associated to them.) The ones that break in MathPlayer, well that's unfortunate, but I think they're all bugs in MathPlayer (probably missing some symbols in the fonts they use) and there's nothing I can do about it. I'll play with them but I don't promise much. We should document these at ../Bugs in browser MathML support/MathPlayer. I plan support for \color at some stage. Coverage of symbols will improve in future versions of blahtex. Dmharvey 22:38, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

\not\cong not working

 * Reported by: 80.136.184.61 14:24, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Status: fixed in blahtex 0.4.3

Double quotes don't work

 * Reported by: someone on the wikitech-l mailing list on April 4th. (Added here by Dmharvey 12:19, 20 April 2006 (UTC))
 * Status: open in blahtex 0.4.4

Description
Things like \text{``A''} don't work.

array doesn't work

 * Reported by: marienfeld c/o nue.tu-berlin.de on February 5th 2007.
 * Status:

Description
\begin{array} a & b \\ c & d \end{array} doesn't work.

also tabular doesn't work

 * Reported by: Jonathan Sand sand@gizmolab.com Aug 16, 2007.
 * Status:

Description
\begin{tabular} a \end{tabular} doesn't work.

Cant write to math temp dir

 * Reported by:sebastian, sebastian dumdidumdidum less.dk
 * Status:

Description
I m not sure if this is an error 40 or a bug, but my blahtex in mediawiki (using the 1.7 alpha from berlios.de)

keeps reporting: Failed to parse (Can't write to or create math temp directory): \frac{a}{b}

my DefaultSettings.php:

$wgTexvc = './math/texvc'; /** Location of the blahtex binary. If empty, texvc is used instead */ $wgBlahtex = '/var/www/localhost/html/testwiki1.7alpha/blahtex/blahtex'; /** Command-line options for blahtex */ $wgBlahtexOptions = '--debug --mathml --temp-directory /var/www/localhost/html/testwiki1.7alpha/blahtex/temp --texvc-compatible-commands --mathml-version-1-fonts --disallow-plane-1 --spacing strict';

all the temp dirs in question have been chowned to the apache user, and set to 777 on top of that.

any ideas?

thanks

Compilation fails at ParseTree3.cpp

 * Reported by:
 * Status: open in blahtex 0.4.4 !

Description
Comilation fails with gcc 4.1.1 on linux:

$ make linux g++ -O3  -c -o source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.o source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.cpp source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.cpp:348: error: definition of 'void blahtex::LatexFeatures::Update(const std::wstring&)' is not in  namespace enclosing 'blahtex::LatexFeatures' make: *** [source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.o] Error 1

Compilation fails also with gcc 4.1.2 on linux debian etch

$ make linux g++ -O3  -c -o source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.o source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.cpp source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.cpp:348: error: definition of ‘void blahtex::LatexFeatures::Update(const std::wstring&)’ is not in namespace enclosing ‘blahtex::LatexFeatures’ make: *** [source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.o] Error 1

Solution
LatexFeatures::Update(const wstring& command) is defined inside the wrong namespace (ParseTree). Cut out the definition in source/BlahtexCore/ParseTree3.cpp (lines 348-674) and place it inside the blahtex</tt> namespace, i.e. copy it to line 181 just above the line that reads

namespace ParseTree

That should solve it (hope I didn't break any golden rules when 'posting' like this).

Added by Mads Ipsen