From: John Dorianjm.dorian@yahoo.com 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:
- texvc - works, but generating bitmapped PNGs is suboptimal and not what I
have in mind for the future in terms of scalable typesetting
- 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/
I would also recommend considering ways to create a more 'native' in-browser equation editor interface, perhaps piggybacking on native MathML when available. TeX is usually pretty nicely symbolic but folks who aren't familiar with it still have a learning curve, whereas MathML is very cumbersome to write manually even if you know all the goodies.
At a minimum some help/examples and a live preview would be hugely helpful; at best a wysiwyg-like editor that lets you type and has a nice symbol library at hand could be very spiff.
If looking narrowly at the question of better output for existing TeX bits, use of something like mathjax as a TeX->mathml/html converter could be very handy.
-- brion
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Lee Worden worden.lee@gmail.com wrote:
From: John Dorianjm.dorian@yahoo.com 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:
- texvc - works, but generating bitmapped PNGs is suboptimal and not
what I
have in mind for the future in terms of scalable typesetting
- 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/
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Good Afternoon MediaWiki Fans:
Has anyone seen anything like this during an update.php run:
Checking filearchive indices... ...have ss_active_users field in site_stats table. ...ss_active_users user count set... ...have ipb_allow_usertalk field in ipblocks table. ...pl_namespace, tl_namespace, il_to indices are already UNIQUE. Creating change_tag table...A database query syntax error has occurred. The last attempted database query was: "CREATE TABLE `change_tag` ( ct_rc_id int NULL, ct_log_id int NULL, ct_rev_id int NULL, ct_tag varchar(255) NOT NULL, ct_params BLOB NULL ) ENGINE=InnoDB, DEFAULT CHARSET=binary " from within function "DatabaseBase::sourceStream". Database returned error "1050: Table '`myWikiDb`.`change_tag`' already exists (localhost)"
The interesting thing is, I can't find any "change_tag" table in any database. I don't know where it is getting this information. This is an upgrade from 1.13.x to 1.16.x
--Hiram
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