On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 04:26:19PM -0600, Derek Moore wrote:
Aside from that, my own observations are this:
- Fonts seem to be over anti-aliased. '+', '-', and '=' signs are all
blury, when they should be distinct, straight lines.
- 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).
- 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.