Re: [Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality(eliminate white background)

Hello everyone, I'm totally new to this list, so please pardon me if it's the wrong place to discuss my idea and please point me to a more suitable list. Today, while reading my morning load of news I've come across a Wikipedia article[1] with some embedded LaTeX formulae, used within a table. The table header on that page has background of a distinct color which makes formula images look ugly. Sorry, the article is in Russian and I didn't find an English counterpart to demonstrate the issue, but by looking at the table you should get the idea. My first thought was "What if we could eliminate that white background in favor of alpha channel?" Then it will look equally well no matter what background it is put. As I have some experience with PNG images and alpha channel stuff, I've wrote this simple half-page program (attached) in C++ to transform any grayscale PNG image containing black-on-white text to image with alpha channel added, so it display nicely on any background (except black :). The program uses PNG++, a C++ wrapper library[2] around libpng. A mockup of what it'll look like if we replace currently used formula image in the table header, with an image transformed by my program is attached as well. I think that visual improvement is immediately obvious. Now, thanks for your patience if you read till here. :) I'd like to know if there any drawbacks[3] to the proposed approach? Was it by design that white background is preserved, if so why and can this be refined somehow? -- Regards, Alex [1] http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%… Note: scroll down one page to see the table [2] http://www.nongnu.org/pngpp/ [3] It needs to be tested with IE6, as it is well known for problems with transparent PNGs.