On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 04:26:19PM -0600, Derek Moore wrote:
Aside from that, my own observations are this:
1) Fonts seem to be over anti-aliased. '+', '-', and '=' signs
are all
blury, when they should be distinct, straight lines.
2) Fonts seem to be over weighted, i.e., everything looks somewhat bold.
These are all pretty much ghostscripts' defaults.
We could experiment with font size (texvc uses 120, some people think even
smaller would look better, but I'm not sure if it would be so on larger
displays too).
3) Inline math doesn't feel very readable.
PlanetMath's inline equations
feel a bit more readable than texvc's.
On default settings texvc has concept of "conservativeness" level.
If math is simple it renders it in properly-italicized HTML, otherwise
it renders it in PNG. In practice most of inline equations will be
rendered in HTML, and most of displayed equations in PNG, so it
will look more or less right. This is most that can be done without
analyzing context where math appears.
Also, what about <math> ... </math>
conflicting with MathML? If people
employ MathML in an article, does texvc check between the <math> ...
</math> tags to see whether it's MathML or TeX? Instead of overloading
standard tags, maybe it should be <tex> ... </tex>, and then just let
people know that Wikipedia only supports a subset of TeX for math purposes
only.
MathML isn't supposed to be written by humans, so I don't see a problem here.
If some new markup was added, <math> could be extended to alternative markups,
like: <math type="mathml"><mrow>some scary
equation</mrow></math>.
In any case, that would make parsing of pages faster,
as the "Is
this MathML or TeX?" logic could be thrown out. The price of that logic
may be trivial now, but what about when Wikipedia is serving hundreds of
thousands of pages a day? Plus it would make all the texvc input
forward-compatible if it's decided someday that fuller TeX support is
needed and that <tex> ... </tex> tags should be used.
Computation costs would be really negligible. Checking whether something
is MathML or TeX is probably 4 or 5 orders of magnitude less resource-sensitive
than the rest of things we do to render page.