27 Feb
2008
27 Feb
'08
10:31 p.m.
Le 25 févr. 08 à 11:48, Sergiu Dumitriu a écrit :
This difference is livable to all mathematicians I know of.
This option has been difficult and haunting for many many many folks.
Therefore I was more than happy to see the appearance of a TeX daemon
in the form of MathTran.
We can still shop for MathML-based solutions:
- a browser-level editor (in GWT ideally(!))
- a feature-rich syntax-to-mathml-p converter
- a rendering to picture and a rendering for print
I'm just worried it takes muuuuch longer.
paul
That is exactly one of the problems with MathTran: It
is on a remote
host. This means that:
- it might not be usable in some strict intranets, where there's no or
restricted access to the internet
- If the MathTran server is down, then no images will appear
- It increases the traffic to an external server
If it were to be installed on a local server, then we're back to the
other problem: heavy installation.
This flexibility is sane I feel.
be fully rich
since this language is not specified) is LaTeX to
MathML... the differences always byte TeX-experts. This is my sole
reason to push a pure TeX approach such as MathTran (aside of the
high-layout-quality).
Still, it is TeX and not LaTeX, as I read in the Moodle page talking
about MathTran. This is a drawback, as LaTeX users will be
confused. I,
for one, know only the LaTeX syntax. A problem with non-TeX is that the result is not as
good looking as a
TeX one. Damn, those articles look good! Still, the wiki is not
meant to
be the complete article authoring product. It is just the place where
the authors can collaborate on the article, and have a fair preview of
how the document would look, then export it as a LaTeX document which
can be processed by a real tex system.
As reaction to your concerns, Jonathan Fine has posted a blog entry:
http://jonathanfine.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/using-mathtran-in-
blogs-and-wikis/
which describes well the embedding methods.
I tend to believe that XWiki distributions (SPAWN distributions)
should ship with the medium (proxied) method (maybe optionally
activated) and with DVI processing for printing (again an option,
depends on the TeX fonts).
And another thing is that the STIX fonts are almost
(!) ready. They
are
passed the beta preview stage, and will soon be final. Perhaps MathML
and PNG-ed MathML equation will look better with those fonts.
There's more than the fonts... there's the layout capabilities and
this is where no system competes.
And, sure, Stixfonts can do a lot but they have been soooooo late
that trust is not really best... the beta was for several years ago!
Should I
rather stop the TeX approach (MathTran has limitations e.g.
with the usage of self-defined macros) and push more the MathML one?
It's basically about assessing the "eternal need for real TeX".
I'd say that the web is moving towards XML and XML languages. MathML
belongs to the future. There are much more tools that support MathML
than (La)TeX.
Still, asking users to write MathML in the wiki content is too
much. So,
there should be support for LaTeX equations, but they should not be
interpreted by a TeX engine (be it local or a remote service), instead
they should be transformed into MathML (as good as possible, whenever
there's a difference it can be addressed and fixed).