Extension talk:Blahtex

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Not certain of the eventual intent…
Will this allow us to enter equations directly in MathML, or do we still have to work with the LateX code? —Phil | Talk 10:03, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I suspect you can type the MathML directly in, MediaWiki software will pass this straight through. Similar to the way you can used raw html &lt;table&gt; tags rather than the wiki {| ... |} syntax. Latex does offer a number of advantages as a more compact syntax and might be able to work better with broweser which can't handle mathml. --Salix alba 11:56, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * MathML was never intended to be something you entered directly, but rather something that browsers understood. Typing MathML in by hand would be a major pain. Blahtex converts easy to enter LaTeX code to browser compatible MathML. -- Fropuff 18:42, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * What Phil is asking for is certainly possible, but it's not part of our immediate plans (for the reasons outlined by Fropuff). Dmharvey 20:41, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Anti alias
I guess that this is a bug with mozilla's mathml rendering rather than blahtex, but I'm getting a lot of ugly looking aliasing effects especially for the integral signs. --Salix alba 11:48, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * What operating system and browser are you using? Dmharvey 20:36, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Heres the image I get [[Image:Integral sign.png|right]]. A lot seems to do with the font size I'm using, my default is 16pt, when I up the font size a couple of notches things look much better, but still some antialiasing effects. It seems to be quite a well know bug. It looks like a new set of fonts Stix Fonts is in production which hopefully should fix the problems. I tried using the different font.mathfont-family options see which did not seem to have much effect. I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5 with all the math fonts included. --Salix alba 15:55, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Do you have Windows' "ClearType" functionality switched on? I haven't used windows for a while, but it's somewhere in "desktop appearance" settings or something like that. Dmharvey 16:59, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Doctype and xml def
I tried running the example page through the W3C validator. Lots of errors due to not finding the DOCTYPE on first line, I then created a local copy removing the initial  decleration for much imporved results. Page seemed to work in Mozilla fine when loading from my local disk. I guess the trick is to convince media wiki to output the correct mime-type. --Salix alba 16:03, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what the problem was. At the moment, the validator shows "only" 8 errors and, as far as I can see, none have to do with the DOCTYPE. -- Jitse Niesen 20:48, 10 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes it works for me too, now. Not sure whats happened and I can't seem to replicate the bug. I did notice the the &lt;?xml decleration now has a character enconding, and the xml and doctype declerations are on the same line, but neither of these seem to have caused the problem. --Salix alba 18:29, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

BlahTeX works in IE
The good news is that BlahTex works for me in IE 6.02 with the MathPlayer plugin, heres a screen shot to prove it. --Salix alba 00:35, 1 February 2006 (UTC)



Blahtex in WP soon?
I hope this is the right place to ask: What about just "switching on" blahTeX in Wikipedia? How far is the implementation in MediaWiki, is any help needed there? BlahTeX itself seems to work fine now, the syntax is being fixed, so when can we do the next step?--Gwaihir 23:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Not sure yet. I have been working on this for nine months now, and along the way I have learned to be patient :-) MediaWiki integration is fairly advanced, as you can see from the test wiki. This is all in Jitse's capable hands. He wants to do a bit more documentation, and still needs to port the changes to a more recent version of mediawiki. Right now he's away and sounds like he will be quite busy for a few weeks, so I don't expect it to happen immediately. Then we need to get the attention of the core developers -- the people with root access -- and encourage them to install our modifications. So it will still be a little while. Dmharvey 23:45, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't want to sound impatient, but... I noticed that some users try to fix formulas which are not displayed correctly by texvc, like converting $$a\bmod m$$ (a\bmod m) to $$a\,\bmod\,m$$ (a\,\bmod\,m), which is incorrect in TeX. Instead of fixing the bug in texvc, would it be possible to migrate to blahTeX without switching on the MathML generation, just to get the correct PNGs?--Gwaihir 10:16, 23 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Blahtex is going to have the same problems, though, since it's using TeX as presentational markup instead of semantic markup. — Omegatron 18:59, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikimania 2006 Call for papers
Just noticed the [Call for papers] it might be a good way to publize Blahtex and get things moving towards integration. --Salix alba 08:01, 28 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I guess I would be happy to write something up. It would be even nicer to be able to give a talk there. Unfortunately, even though I live and work right where the conference is happening, I expect to be out of town for the entire time the conference is on. Bummer. Dmharvey 12:28, 28 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Just noticed that its possible to submit a poster to wikimania, which does not require that we actually attend. We would need to act soon to get the poster accepted. --Salix alba 09:50, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Javascript
See asciimath asciimath ported to PHP. Why Wikipedia doesn't use it? Note that LaTex or other type of coding (Mathematica, Mapple, Matlab, ....) may work too. See also ASCIISvg134.157.170.184 11:48, 20 March 2006 (UTC)


 * In theory it would probably be possible. Try googling "mediawiki asciimath" for some attempts. There are two major hurdles to overcome:
 * getting mediawiki to serve XHTML correctly in such a way that browsers don't break. This is an issue for any attempt to get mediawiki outputting MathML, and indeed that's where quite a bit of our effort is sunk. Once we've done a decent job of this, it will become easier for others to add their own preferred flavour of MathML support.
 * Wikipedia itself currently has about 200,000 equations (including the largest 13 languages). It would be necessary to check if ASCIIMath (or whatever) could handle all those equations. ASCIIMath's page suggests that it only supports a small subset of LaTeX, so I'm guessing the answer is "no". Blahtex can currently handle all but about 400 of them.
 * Dmharvey 13:29, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer, I will test Wikipedia formula on Tiddly Math to see to which extend Javascript can help. Look like jsMath "parses a bigger subset of LaTeX and does not require MathML support". 134.157.170.184 13:52, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Userbox for supporting Blahtex
I made a Userbox for my Wikipedia user page indicating my support of Blahtex:



Nothing fancy, of course. It's just for myself; I am not proposing to do anything controversial, but I thought you might be interested in seeing it. Is it OK if I do this? If so, then ... --Michael Kinyon 06:03, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I have the info text linking here to Meta, but would you instead prefer it link to wiki.blahtex.org or blahtex.org?
 * Would you prefer I use the other image without the flower, or no image at all?
 * Any suggestions for background colors, borders, etc.?


 * I just adjusted it. 100 pixels was way too big. This looks OK. --Michael Kinyon

A question about compatibility
Hello - Blahtex looks like a great project, which I think we may use. I do have a question, which I can't seem to find the answer to. We are using MediaWiki to develop a series of course modules for our introductory logic sequence, and as such, we use a math markup a lot. It is our intention to serve these pages to our students using MediaWiki. All our stduents will all browse anonymously. (Account creation is restricted.) Is there support for on the fly detection of MathML browser compability built into Blahtex? That is, can Blahtex determine if the browser supports MathML send it MathML if it does and a PNG if it doesn't? If so, this would be optimal for our needs. Thanks! --Kzollman 20:21, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

When?
Any ideas when MathML will finally be deployed? (I.e., when will I be able enter equations in LaTeX, and see them appear on the page as MathML instead of ugly GIFs?) Thanks. 70.21.225.137 07:00, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Who do we complain to to get this deployed as soon as possible? — Omegatron 18:58, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

When is this going to go live on Wikipedia?! 71.167.58.215 00:04, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Fontsize in PNGs
Is there a way to adjust the font-size for the rendered images? LaTeX commands like \small don't seem to work.

I'm interested in this topic, too: How can I change the standard output size?

It would be great if there is a way to adjust the font size to match the size of the surrounding text.

Units
Would it be possible to create \unit or something similar to signify units in the expression and use mathML unit formatting? People use strange spaced and roman fonts to signify units, or put them outside the expression and write them with regular HTML. There's no obviously correct solution. — Omegatron 18:57, 25 November 2006 (UTC)