Dear MediaWiki developers,
I have written a LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for Wikipedia.
More information is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex.
There is also a download page at http://abel.math.harvard.edu/~dmharvey/blahtex/index.php where you will find: * source code (C++, GNU GPL license) * interactive online demo * every equation in (English) Wikipedia filtered through texvc and blahtex, side by side for visual comparison
I am hoping that this will spur some action towards getting MediaWiki to actually spit out real MathML. I am aware that there are some very complicated issues involved and that this is not an easy problem to solve. Nevertheless, I hope that having a working converter (at least at some kind of decent alpha stage) will inspire some effort in this direction.
I have cross-posted a similar message at Village Pump:technical and on the mathematics wikiproject talk page.
If you have ideas about how to make this happen, I want to hear about it! Thanks in advance for your help.
David Harvey (User:Dmharvey on en.wikipedia.org and at meta.wikimedia.org)
David Harvey wrote:
Dear MediaWiki developers,
I have written a LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for Wikipedia.
More information is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex.
Neat!
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 8/3/05, David Harvey dmharvey@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I have written a LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for Wikipedia.
In the meantime, Dave has released a new version which compiles cleanly on Linux (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex ) and I have been trying to integrate it in MediaWiki (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex/How_to_make_MathML_work_in_MediaWiki ).
A major issue is that MathML needs to be embedded in XML. This means that all pages served by MediaWiki need to be valid XHTML (or, at least, close enough to valid that they are accepted by the browsers, which are far less forgiving for XHTML documents than for HTML documents). This probably requires changes in the code all over MediaWiki; I hope there is some support for this. Furthermore, Internet Explorer does not render documents with an XHTML or XML media type, so we need to find a way to serve Internet Explorer plain HTML documents (as always, without degrading performance too much); see the second link above for some further details. We'd love to hear some ideas on how to tackle this.
Furthermore, we'd like to set up a wiki where people can try this out so that we can get more input from the Wikimedia communities, but neither Dave nor I have the resources for this. Any suggestions?
Cheers, Jitse Niesen [[m:User:Jitse Niesen]]
On 8/18/05, Jitse Niesen jitse.niesen@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/05, David Harvey dmharvey@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I have written a LaTeX to MathML converter designed specifically for Wikipedia.
In the meantime, Dave has released a new version which compiles cleanly on Linux (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex ) and I have been trying to integrate it in MediaWiki (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex/How_to_make_MathML_work_in_MediaWiki ).
A major issue is that MathML needs to be embedded in XML. This means that all pages served by MediaWiki need to be valid XHTML (or, at least, close enough to valid that they are accepted by the browsers, which are far less forgiving for XHTML documents than for HTML documents). This probably requires changes in the code all over MediaWiki; I hope there is some support for this. Furthermore, Internet Explorer does not render documents with an XHTML or XML media type, so we need to find a way to serve Internet Explorer plain HTML documents (as always, without degrading performance too much); see the second link above for some further details. We'd love to hear some ideas on how to tackle this.
Can't you use the Javascript/DOM manipulation trick, Peter Jipsen has suggested for HTML files: http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/mathhtmltest.phtml
Or is this an undocumented feature of most Gecko based browsers?
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org