Extension:Math/Roadmap

Introduction
The Math extension (or, more broadly, the rendering of the tag) has a long history. It has been modified by a number of different people with different goals, different ideas, and different and programming styles, using different underlying technologies. As a result, the extension's current implementation is more a grown than a well-designed or -documented structure.

An overview of what can currently be done with this extension is found at the English Wikipedia's documentation.

The aim of this page is to co-ordinate the development activities concerning this extension.

Wanted features
See also Making Math Searchable in Wikipedia
 * MathML support
 * Specification 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.) see Extension:MathSearch
 * Automatic numbering of equations (bug 5600)

Current activities
Currently the following changesets are open: 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 here.

As a first demo, rendering all Wikipedia 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
 * 5856, 10186 and 6722 are related to mhchem package. Users seem to be very interested in this.  Perhaps this should looked into.
 * 20902 request to install chemarr
 * 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.
 * 31546 Make error messages for Math use wikitext (Nobody assigned... Maybe target release 2.1)
 * 36063 Math settings provided by MathJax should be a part of user preferences. (Nobody assigned... Maybe target release 2.2)

Visual Appearance Issues
For a list of all bugs see
 * 15777 I have to agree this looks fairly bad. Curious if switching to dvisvg would straighten this out.
 * 38722

Localization

 * 2458 In TeX/LaTeX terms, this is about the babel package.

Abandoned changes
A list of abandoned changes. If anybody want to work on them the can be restored:
 * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/129974/
 * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/130828/
 * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/4060/
 * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/64523/