Toby Bartels is a troll and I'm not going to listen any more to what he says.

But he may have some valid criticisms that could only make texvc better. Although he seems to be a bit fundamentalist about what texvc should allow in his comments on the TeX testing pages; e.g., "...we really don't need TeX support inline, it should probably not be supported inline. ... Wikipedia's math should stick to English letters in boldface and italic whenever possible, for the widest readability, with exceptions only for things (like [pi]) that are universally rendered in other fonts."

Aside from that, my own observations are this:

1) Fonts seem to be over anti-aliased. '+', '-', and '=' signs are all blury, when they should be distinct, straight lines.

2) Fonts seem to be over weighted, i.e., everything looks somewhat bold.

3) Inline math doesn't feel very readable. PlanetMath's inline equations feel a bit more readable than texvc's.

Of course, these are rather non-technical criticisms of texvc's font rendering. I'd suggest employing whatever font rendering defaults that PlanetMath is using, as their equations feel much more readable and much less ugly.

Also, what about <math> ... </math> conflicting with MathML? If people employ MathML in an article, does texvc check between the <math> ... </math> tags to see whether it's MathML or TeX? Instead of overloading standard tags, maybe it should be <tex> ... </tex>, and then just let people know that Wikipedia only supports a subset of TeX for math purposes only. In any case, that would make parsing of pages faster, as the "Is this MathML or TeX?" logic could be thrown out. The price of that logic may be trivial now, but what about when Wikipedia is serving hundreds of thousands of pages a day? Plus it would make all the texvc input forward-compatible if it's decided someday that fuller TeX support is needed and that <tex> ... </tex> tags should be used.

Just my thoughts...

Okay, I'm done now,

Derek

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