New subject: [Mediawiki-l] future planning for math/equations in mediawiki

12 May 2011

...
  From: John Dorian&lt;jm.dorian(a)yahoo.com&gt;
 Subject: [Mediawiki-l] future planning for math/equations in mediawiki

 I'm hoping to get some advice or perspectives so I don't overlook something.
 I'm looking to future-plan for math/equations in a mediawiki environment.
 [...]
...
  In general:
 - MathML is supported natively by Firefox, and probably WebKit (Safari)
 eventually
 - TeX is not likely to be native supported, and will require some sort of
 conversion for (X)HTML environments

 which looks like a win for MathML

 However,_right_  now, TeX has better support in MediaWiki
 (for what I find odd reasons)
 The methods that work now are:

 1. texvc - works, but generating bitmapped PNGs is suboptimal and not what I
 have in mind for the future in terms of scalable typesetting

 2. MathJax (two sub-methods): [...]
...
  Am I the only one who finds this odd - that I
can't write MathML input, but yet
 mediawiki and MathJax are moving with browsers to having MathML as the rendered
 output?

 This seems like a waste - I have to worry writing nice TeX, then worry about how
 it is converted by MathJax to MathML, and any possible bugs in that conversion
 process - when I could just write MathML and have only to worry about how
 Firefox renders it.

 What advice do people have about a "good way" (simple, future compatible,
least
 likely to break with converters) to deal with math/equations in mediawiki?

 Thank you in advance for your thoughts and insight. 
MathML is generally considered too cumbersome for writing by hand, and 
in fact it wasn't designed to be written by hand [1].  TeX seems to be 
the most popular format for authoring math to be translated to MathML, 
though there are other ways [2].

Along with the two MediaWiki extensions you mention, WorkingWiki [3] 
also provides TeX-to-MathML translation [4] similar to what texvc 
provides.  It uses LaTeXML [5] to do the translation, a third-party tool 
that was developed to create the online version of the standard Handbook 
of Mathematical Functions [6].

WorkingWiki does substantially more than translate math expressions, but 
it should be possible to create an inline-math-only option if there was 
demand.

Lee Worden
McMaster University / UC Berkeley
http://leeworden.net

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathml#cite_note-1
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathml#Software_support
[3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WorkingWiki
[4] 
http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/projects/index.php/WorkingWiki/Tutorial…
[5] http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/
[6] http://dlmf.nist.gov/

Re: [Mediawiki-l] future planning for math/equations in mediawiki