Hi Markus,
with regard to the beta status: I think if word was open source it would be called word-beta. Mathoid can be installed locally, via npm install mathoid. If your application supports HTML5 you can just include the MathML returned by your local mathoid installation (or take the cached version from the service wmf provides for the public benefits. You could also install your own restbase instance for caching. However, this requires some technical skills. Gabriel Wicke and me are working on Docker Containers, to simplify the installation procedure. When you use MathML there are (in theory) no problems with the styling and the integration to your custom application. However, for devices that do not fully support HTML5 the fallback images are not optimal, since their shape is fixed. They look similar to the way how LaTeX would render the input and do not adjust to the layout. While LaTeX is appreciated by many scientists, web browsers are no TeX renders and display the declarative style information. Note, that this is a completely different approach from imperative TeX typesetting instructions. MathJax now tries to support imperative typesetting instructions within a declarative document. While this is a nice bridge technology, we should finally aim for full declaratively.
Putting that in a broader picture, I completely share your initial skepticism in starting with this texvc dialect. The optimal way would certainly be to support content MathML to support all the formula semantics https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter4.html . However, while this is a nice idea I think it's not very likely at the moment that people would enter content MathML expressions. Therefore, I think it's reasonable to start with the same format that used within Wikipedia, and keep the formats in sync. For the future one could image a tex dialect that includes semantic macros that link to the semantic concepts as defined in the MathML sepc For example the following input $ Z(t) = \exp@{\iunit \vartheta(t)} \RiemannZeta@{\tfrac{1}{2}+\iunit t} $ Which would be rendered as displayed here http://drmf.wmflabs.org/wiki/Formula:DLMF:25.10:E1 The input form above was used by the editors of the DLMF http://dlmf.nist.gov/ to produce a digital version of the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene A. Stegun. While there are a lot of plans what could be done in the future like for instance - Identifier Namespaces in Mathematical Notation http://de.slideshare.net/AlexeyGrigorev/identifier-namespaces-in-mathematica...) - Wolfram Alpha integration https://www.dima.tu-berlin.de/menue/theses/open_theses/msc_integrating_compu... We still need to walk before we run. I.e. start with something simple and plan more advanced stuff for the future. The intermediate next steps are discussed here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67397 If you think that there is an idea that is ready to implement please share it in the structured task tracker.
Thank you again for all your input and the interest in that project. Moritz
*Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student in the Database Systems and Information Management Group. While this message reflects my personal opinion, I might have been influenced from Database Research ideas. Moreover, I'm director of the MathML association and there committed to the association goals in enabling math rendering in all Web rendering engines http://mathml-association.org/ . In addition, I'm an offsite collaborator of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the USA and I really appreciate standards.
Moritz Schubotz TU Berlin, Fakultät IV DIMA - Sekr. EN7 Raum E-N 741 Einsteinufer 17 D-10587 Berlin Germany
Tel.: +49 30 314 22784 Mobil:+49 1578 047 1397 E-Mail: schubotz@tu-berlin.de Skype: Schubi87 ICQ: 200302764 Msn: Moritz@Schubotz.de
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Markus Krötzsch [mailto:markus@semantic-mediawiki.org] Gesendet: Donnerstag, 4. Februar 2016 08:20 An: Schubotz, Moritz; Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Betreff: Re: AW: AW: [Wikidata] upcoming deployments/features
Hi Moritz,
On 03.02.2016 15:25, Schubotz, Moritz wrote:
Hi Markus,
I think we agree on the goals cf. http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6179 By the way the texvc dialect is now 13 years old at least. For now it's required to be 100% compatible to the texvc dialect in order to use wikidata in Mediawiki instances. However, for the future there are also plans to support more markup. But all new options are blocked by https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T74240
Mathoid, the service that converts the texvc dialect to MathML, SVG + PNG can also be used without a MediaWiki instance. I posted links to the Restbase Web UI before.
api.formulasearchengine.com (with experimental features) de.wikipedia.org/api (stable)
This is the API you said "has been opened to the public just moments ago" and which describes itself as "currently in beta testing"? That seems a bit shaky to say the least. In your email, you said that this API was for extracting LaTeX package names and identifiers, not for rendering content, so I have not looked at it for this purpose. How does this compare to MathJax in terms of usage? Are the output types similar? It seems your solution adds the dependency on an external server, so this cannot be used in offline mode, I suppose? How does it support styling of content for your own application, e.g., how do you select the fonts to be used?
I think we agree that real documentation should be a bit more than an unexplained link in an email. Anyway, it is not your role to provide documentation on new Wikidata features or to make sure that stakeholders are taken along when new features are deployed, so don't worry too much about this. I am sure your students did a good job implementing this, and from there on it is really in other people's hands.
Cheers,
Markus
Am 03.02.2016 um 14:31 schrieb Markus Krötzsch:
Hi Moritz,
I must say that this is not very reassuring. So basically what we have in this datatype now is a "LaTeX-like" markup language that is only supported by one implementation that was created for MediaWiki, and partially by a LaTeX package that you created.
Markus, this TeX dialoect is not a new invention by Moritz. It's what the Math extension for MediaWiki has been using for over a decade now, and it's used on hundreds of thousands of pages on Wikipedia. All that we are doing now is making this same exact syntax available for property values on wikibase, using the same exact code for rendering it.
I think having consistent handling for math formulas between wikitext and wikibase is the right thing to do. Of course it would have been nice for MediaWiki to not invent it's own TeX dialect for this, but it's 10 years to late for that complaint now.
Moritz, I seem to recall that the new Math extension uses a standalone service for rendering TeX to PNG, SVG, or MathML. Can that service easily be used outside the context of MediaWiki?