The only change is CGI interface (written in Ocaml) to texvc,
available from math/texvc_cgi
It can be used to see HTML output, real TeX and generated image.
It's very rough, not i18ned and it doesn't even try to make sure that
TeX looks well on output. But it's just a small auxiliary script,
not part of Wikipedia proper, so fixing those problems is not a priority.
Please, let's do it Axel's way. He contributes most of the math articles. Besides, I also want to be able to edit a math equation directly in my browser.
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 12:47 PM
To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 4
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw(a)users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 07:02:34PM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:
> > TeX is not just for math nerds.
> > There are several powerful macro packages for creating all sorts of
> > diagrams, flow charts and graphics. These would provide huge
> > benefits to lots of Wikipedians outside of math.
>
> You will still be able to compile them on your computer and upload,
> just like you can do it now.
Sure, but I don't want to, because it's not the wiki way: people who
intend to improve my work are then required to install the necessary
software and recreate the work from scratch. It's clearly much more
user friendly to allow direct editing of the work's description in the
browser.
My point was that you want to give up this advantage for the goal of
output format independence, and that I don't agree with these
priorities.
Axel
Main changes:
= More TeX supported =
Number of passed PlanetMath equations raised from 3553 (56%) to 4432 (70%)
of 6302 total.
Portability of equations from PlanetMath is horrible - authors of articles
just love to create just a few commands more, to make markup look more cute.
Two such definitions: \reals (== \mathbb{R}) and \cnums (== \mathbb{C}) were
so popular that I simply had to add support for them to texvc.
This should be a warning for us - math markup on Wikipedia would be as
horrible as that if we allowed any TeX. (With texvc extensions you can
at least get real TeX from it).
There is also some stuff that I'm not sure if we really want to support,
most notably sub and sup scripting nothing. ($_x$ and $^y$)
Having said that, some of the failures are still texvc's fault.
= AMS Fonts =
If any of special AMS features are used, like \mathbb, AMS (amsmath, amsfonts and
amssymb) is loaded. I'm not sure if there is any point in loading it by default,
it would certainly slow down rendering.
Similar mechanism could be used to support many modules and keep performance
reasonable at the same time.
I think I forgot to mention this except on the French list; earlier
today I added a rollback-last-edit function (for sysops). It's currently
accessible from the user contributions page; next to 'top' revisions,
there's a 'rollback' link which will resave that page with the most
recent revision by an author other than the most current.
It's basically just a shortcut for page->history->old revision->
edit->save, not a new functionality, but rather handy if you've got to
do more than a couple at a time.
(See changes to Article.php; slighter to Language.php, wiki.phtml,
SpecialContributions.php)
I've also put the current CVS revision of everything as of a few hours
ago onto all the languages, so we should be running consistent.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Main changes:
== texvc accepts more TeX ==
== texvc_test for mass tests ==
Tested on corpus of TeX equations downloaded and perl-extracted
from PlanetMath, and it accepts 3553 of 6302.
Two things to consider about this numbers:
* These "equations" were extracted by very primitive regular
expression (/\$([^$]+)\$/), and many of them aren't really equations.
* lot of those that are use features predefined in prefaces
of particular articles.
It would really help if I could get real TeX sources of PlanetMath somehow.
Any idea ?
== HTML rendering engine is more powerful ==
It can render fractions now, like that one:
<math>\sum^{N+M}_{k=0} k^6 + \frac{\sum_{i=1}^M i}{\prod_{j=1}^N j}</math>
What is transformed into acceptably-looking but impossible to write by hand
code like that:
<table><tr align=center valign=bottom><td>N+M<td><td><table><tr align=center valign=bottom>
<td>M<td></tr><tr align=center><td><font size=+2>∑</font><td>i</tr><tr align=center valign=top>
<td>i=1<td></tr></table></tr><tr align=center><td><font size=+2>∑</font><td>k<sup>6</sup>+<td>
<hr style="{background: black}"></tr><tr align=center valign=top><td>k=0<td><td><table>
<tr align=center valign=bottom><td>N<td></tr><tr align=center><td><font size=+2>∏</font>
<td>j</tr><tr align=center valign=top><td>j=1<td></tr></table></tr></table>
Thanks, Brion. That will be very helpful for sysops who are undoing vandalism. Will it also let you enter a comment?
There's always a chance that a page deletion or "Hi, mom!" message is more of a newbie experiment than deliberate damage.
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion@pobox.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 2:38 AM
To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback
I think I forgot to mention this except on the French list; earlier
today I added a rollback-last-edit function (for sysops). It's currently
accessible from the user contributions page; next to 'top' revisions,
there's a 'rollback' link which will resave that page with the most
recent revision by an author other than the most current.
It's basically just a shortcut for page->history->old revision->
edit->save, not a new functionality, but rather handy if you've got to
do more than a couple at a time.
(See changes to Article.php; slighter to Language.php, wiki.phtml,
SpecialContributions.php)
I've also put the current CVS revision of everything as of a few hours
ago onto all the languages, so we should be running consistent.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Here is newest version.
* It allows configuring directories from LocalSettings.php,
* It has nicer support for log-like functions (for example
<math>e ^ \sin \alpha</math> is allowed now, it would
be error in real TeX)
* It contains a TODO file containing list of all things that
should be done before texvc is ready to be used on Wikipedias
(copy&paste from my previous emails mostly).
Recently, the messages to go from a discussion page to the corresponding
page have been changed to get "view user page", "view meta page" etcetera.
It's a nice change, but I now notice that the same has been done on the
non-English Wikipedias too. And that's not nice. I'd rather have a reasonable
text in Dutch than a better one in English on the Dutch Wikipedia. Could this
change thus please be rolled back except for en and meta?
Andre Engels
I often protect a page, before I undo damage to it.
Before reading this thread, my motivation for protecting a damaged page was just to keep the vandal (or newbie experimenter) from mangling the page further. But now I realize that, serendipitously, it also would stop non-sysops from wasting their time duplicating my work.
After I've protected and fixed a number of damaged pages, I then decide whether to label the person responsible a "vandal" or not. If I decide they're a vandal, I block their IP. Then I unprotect all the pages.
Ed Poor
Main changes:
* functions with optional parameter, like \sqrt[n] m vs. \sqrt m
* \mbox {foo}, now ASCII-only, but it will have to support Unicode in future.