On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 07:02:34PM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski
<taw(a)users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
While texvc lacks support for lot of important
features now,
I don't think it will be difficult to make it support 99% of
equations that are used on MathPlanet.
And 80% of those equations we can already represent in Wikipedia using
clean HTML. The remaining features are the fun stuff: commutative
diagrams, matrices and tables, Latex figures, equation arrays, amssymb
etc. That is what TeX mode is really needed for.
Not really. Fractions, sums and integrals can't be represented in clean HTML,
but can be represented in texvc's pseudo-TeX. Many things that are
represented in HTML look ugly on graphical browsers and are completely
illegible in text mode.
And there will always be things that will have to be done by hand and uploaded.
Furthermore, people won't be able to cut-and-paste
our
equations into PlanetMath, which doesn't seem nice.
Well, texvc creates real TeX at some point, so you could copy and
paste that.
As a Wikipedia user, I don't have access to that.
This will be fixed.
TeX is not just for math nerds.
There are several powerful macro packages for creating all sorts of
diagrams, flow charts and graphics. These would provide huge benefits
to lots of Wikipedians outside of math.
You will still be able to compile them on your computer and upload,
just like you can do it now.
Furthermore, trying to become ouput format independent
by inventing a
new input format strikes me as less than helpful.
texvc can support multiple formats for both input and output.
It supports subset of TeX right now and a few extensions to TeX.
Do you think that some of following extensions should be disabled ?
* % is percent (\% in real TeX), not comment
* \foo aliases for \bar, if there exists HTML entity &foo; that means
the same thing as \bar
* a couple cases of inserting {}s where TeX would just fail.
If we turn them off we'll get proper subset of TeX.
Would that be any better ?
And texvc can be extended to support "math in html" or whatever markup
you wish.