Hello

By chance, I had a conversation about this with David Chan at the Python UK Conference last weekend: http://ukpyconuk.org, and here are the ideas we had.

1. MathTran, from http://www.mathtran.org, provides translation of TeX notation to images, as a web service.

2. MathTran serves Math PNGs, that are scalable, editable bitmaps! They contain rich metadata, as can be seen by opening them up in a text editor. See http://www.mathtran.org/wiki/index.php/Math_PNG

3. MathTran is funded by JISC (http://jisc.ac.uk), and they'd probably be delighted to have the server used to serve hieroglyphs as well as math formulas.

4. The SITMO LaTeX editor might have the sort of interface you might want: http://www.sitmo.com/latex.

5. http://www.mathtran.org/wiki is a mediawiki wiki that is MathTran enabled.

Perhaps you'd like to have a look at MathTran, and see if there are enough similarities.

best regards

Jonathan

-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org on behalf of Aoineko Sent: Mon 10/09/2007 19:18 To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikitech-l] Future of WikiHiero extension

Hi all, I'm now working on a full new version of WikiHiero, the extension used to display hieroglyphic text on MediaWiki. The actual version of WikiHiero (active on Wikipedia projects) generates HTML code and use a pre-generated picture for each hieroglyph. The bad thing is the hieroglyph positioning into a quadrat (a square that can contain from 1 to many hieroglyphs) is done by HTML tables that make it unusable inline with text. As the possibility to use hieroglyphs inline with text is the main request from Wikipedia users (who use horrible hacks to simulate it!), I'm considering the available solutions:

1) Use pictures + CSS

Like actually, we can generate HTML that use pre-generated pictures but do all positioning using CSS. The god: - Cleaner The bad: - Some complex quadrat positioning seems impossible to do without using relative positioning.

2) Generate a picture

Like <math> tag, we can generate on the fly one picture for all the text into the <hiero> tag (original hieroglyph information are in SVG format). The god: - Easy to inline; - Allow complex rendering (like hieroglyph orientation inversion, etc.). The bad: - Server resource consumption if we do it on the fly or hard-disk consumption if we cache generated files.

Can you please give me your advices?

Aoineko / Guillaume

PS: Additional question: There is any good reason to keep compatibility to PHP4 or can I forget it for version 5?

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On 9/10/07, Aoineko aoineko@gamma.ocn.ne.jp wrote:

The bad:

• Some complex quadrat positioning seems impossible to do without using

relative positioning.

What's wrong with relative positioning?

The bad:

• Server resource consumption if we do it on the fly or hard-disk

consumption if we cache generated files.

Not a serious issue, I don't think, although I'm sure you wouldn't see any objections if we could avoid having to worry about it. The existing hieroglyph cache mechanism works fine.