On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 8:38 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Bug 24207 requests switching the math rendering preference default from its current setting (which usually produces a nice PNG and occasionally produces some kinda ugly HTML) to the "always render PNG" setting.
This would also close bugs: * 25645: Improve decision when to render a formula as HTML (this reporter complains about our PNG rendering including fonts) * 26546: Option "MathML if possible" doesn't work * 19177: XHTML parse error when using some math formulas (if we convert to PNG-only you won't have XHTML garbage)
And may be related to: * 15057: problems with forced PNG rendering (possibly a caching issue, but does not seem to have been fixed) * 17465: Port texvc to PHP, reducing external dependencies and development impedence for Math extension (it would be easier to mandate a particular solution if it was /our/ solution and perhaps slightly less bad) * 7208: Change font for texvc-generated images (if people think texvc is ugly because of inconsistent fonts, that's easy enough to fix before we make it the only option) * 16719: Math hashes should include versioning to allow sensible updates (this requires a schema change, so should probably be out for a version or so to iron out the bugs before we really rely on it, but it would be excellent if this was working before PNG rendering became the only option, as it would make PNG rendering a much 'cleaner' only option to have)
I'd actually propose dropping the rendering options entirely...
Drop all of the preferences.
It's conceivable that a few folks really honestly prefer to see the latex source in their graphical browsers (should at least do a quick stat check to see if anybody uses it on purpose), but I wouldn't mind removing that either.
Not likely, latex is hardly pretty, but it's easy enough to check whether it's in use on WMF wikis. I'm not really up to date on the release cycle but is seems really late to do this for 1.18, especially given that we'll likely see a few more complaints about texvc's flow, and it would be nice if there was time for someone to check on bugs 15057, 24445, and 16719.
--Dan