Hello
Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?
Thanks and regards
Uwe Brauer
Uwe,
Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?
It had one hack lately, but nobody is actively developing it. Probably because it is written in OCaml. ;-)
BR,
"Domas" == Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com writes:
Domas> Uwe,
Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?
Domas> It had one hack lately, but nobody is actively developing it. Domas> Probably because it is written in OCaml. ;-)
I see, the issue is (automatically) numbering of equations, which is the feature I miss most (and automatically referencing and labeling)
Do you know about is wikitex, which also does not seem to be too active..
Uwe
"Peter" == Peter Danenberg pcd@wikitex.org writes:
Do you know about is wikitex, which also does not seem to be too active..
Peter> That's just the organic cadence of development; and Peter> yes: WikiTeX can do equation numbering (with a little hack).
Thanks also that is a little off topic, how to do that, I asked on the wikitex mailing list, but the answer I got seemed to indicate that it is not that simple (may be we could continue that discussion privately).
The issue is that recently some mathematical orientated wikis (mostly based on mediawiki) have been founded, which would strongly need such a feature.
Peter> Best, Peter
Uwe
The issue is that recently some mathematical orientated wikis [...] have been founded, which would strongly need such a feature.
If that's a needed feature, then I should introduce it into WikiTeX followingly:
<amsmath style="numbered"></amsmath>
The ugly hack, on the other hand, follows:
<amsmath> \end{displaymath} \begin{equation} % Numbered equations here \end{equation} \begin{displaymath} </amsmath>
I may be able to graft it into 1.1 beta; lets keep in touch on Wikitex-l.
Best, Peter
"Peter" == Peter Danenberg pcd@wikitex.org writes:
The issue is that recently some mathematical orientated wikis [...] have been founded, which would strongly need such a feature.
Peter> If that's a needed feature, then I should introduce it Peter> into WikiTeX followingly:
Peter> <amsmath style="numbered"></amsmath>
Peter> The ugly hack, on the other hand, follows:
Peter> <amsmath> Peter> \end{displaymath} Peter> \begin{equation} Peter> % Numbered equations here Peter> \end{equation} Peter> \begin{displaymath} Peter> </amsmath>
Peter> I may be able to graft it into 1.1 beta; lets keep in touch Peter> on Wikitex-l.
Peter> Best, Peter thanks, right let us move to wikitex-l
Uwe
On 9/26/06, Uwe Brauer oub@mat.ucm.es wrote:
Hello
Could somebody tell me please whether texvc is still under development and who is the author(s), whom I could contact?
Thanks and regards
Uwe Brauer
Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http://www.blahtex.org/). Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)
Fredrik
"Fredrik" == Fredrik Johansson fredrik.johansson@gmail.com writes:
Thanks and regards
Uwe Brauer
Fredrik> Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex Fredrik> (http://www.blahtex.org/). Please help bug David Harvey to Fredrik> continue working on it :-)
But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no? That could cause problems with certain browsers, my mozilla does not display all the symbols correctly and downloading the relevant fonts seems not to work.
Uwe
Fredrik Johansson wrote:
Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http://www.blahtex.org/). Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)
It's never been a problem of David not wanting to continue to work on it, but a problem of the developers still not finding time to look at enabling blahtex on WM sites, even after months of requests for review by a number of people. Developers tend to be over-constrained and focus on keeping the site running, which causes non-critical enhancements to fall by the wayside more often than not.
Uwe Brauer wrote:
But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no?
No, it should do PNG export any day now (maybe already does -- David?).
On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:46 AM, Ivan Krstić wrote:
Fredrik Johansson wrote:
Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http:// www.blahtex.org/). Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)
It's never been a problem of David not wanting to continue to work on it, but a problem of the developers still not finding time to look at enabling blahtex on WM sites, even after months of requests for review by a number of people. Developers tend to be over-constrained and focus on keeping the site running, which causes non-critical enhancements to fall by the wayside more often than not.
Uwe Brauer wrote:
But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no?
No, it should do PNG export any day now (maybe already does -- David?).
Blahtex has always done PNG export. It's much faster than texvc because it uses dvipng instead of the slower imagemagick/dvips pipeline. It also knows how to get vertical alignment of the PNGs correct (aligning the baseline), which does wonders for the final visual quality. And it knows plenty of tex/latex/amslatex commands that texvc doesn't know. And it can do Cyrillic and Japanese (these were test cases for more general multi-script support). So I think its PNG support is *much* better than that of texvc.
I am not planning on maintaining the C++ version of blahtex any more. I am about halfway through a port to Python. It will be almost 100% compatible in terms of command line input/output, so it should be a drop-in replacement for the C++ version.
However, I haven't been working seriously on blahtex for a while now. I have other projects going on, and a life as well. It's encouraging to me to hear a few people showing some interest, perhaps this will make me spend more time on it again :-)
David
"David" == David Harvey dmharvey@math.harvard.edu writes:
David> On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:46 AM, Ivan KrstiÄ wrote:
Fredrik Johansson wrote:
Hopefully texvc will be replaced by Blahtex (http:// www.blahtex.org/). Please help bug David Harvey to continue working on it :-)
It's never been a problem of David not wanting to continue to work on it, but a problem of the developers still not finding time to look at enabling blahtex on WM sites, even after months of requests for review by a number of people. Developers tend to be over-constrained and focus on keeping the site running, which causes non-critical enhancements to fall by the wayside more often than not.
Uwe Brauer wrote:
But blahtex uses mathml exclusively no?
No, it should do PNG export any day now (maybe already does -- David?).
A very good, and those png could be "edited" the same way as they can in texvc?
David> I am not planning on maintaining the C++ version of blahtex any David> more. I am about halfway through a port to Python. It will be almost David> 100% compatible in terms of command line input/output, so it should David> be a drop-in replacement for the C++ version.
David> However, I haven't been working seriously on blahtex for a while David> now. I have other projects going on, and a life as well. It's David> encouraging to me to hear a few people showing some interest, perhaps David> this will make me spend more time on it again :-) it is really a pity that there at least 3 programs floating around:
- Texvc
- Blatex
- Wikitex
To return to my original question, can blahtex easily deal with numeration/references and labels?
Just from a pragmatic point of view, sites like
http://tosio.math.toronto.edu/wiki/index.php/Wave_equations
are very interested to include such a functionality.
I don't hope to start a flame war, but may be the authors of wikitex and blahtex could outline the differences of features of their programs? Or does such a comparison already exit?
Thanks
Uwe Brauer
On Sep 26, 2006, at 10:24 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
it is really a pity that there at least 3 programs floating around:
- Texvc - Blatex - WikitexTo return to my original question, can blahtex easily deal with numeration/references and labels?
No. It has no support. I don't plan any support either. The difficulty is the following: the way that image caching is designed in mediawiki, the PNG output must depend only on the input *for that single equation*. So for example, if you have a numbered equation, and then add another equation *before* that one, then the numbering on the later equation must change. This makes caching images much more difficult, because for example the input "x = y \label{eq:my- equation}" could correspond to two different images on two different pages. There are various ways you could get around this, but all would require a lot more work, and numerous changes to mediawiki itself which I'm not prepared to dive into.
Blahtex is designed to render one equation at a time, no more, no less. The problem of numbering equations is more a problem of *document markup*, which is a problem that should be solved by the enclosing document model, in this case mediawiki itself. I'm thinking something more like using <math label="abc">x = y</math> in the wikitext itself, and then <mathref>abc</mathref> later on to refer to it. This would be a much better solution, and would be completely independent of the mathematics rendering engine.
Perhaps Wikitex has worked out how to solve this problem.
Just from a pragmatic point of view, sites like
http://tosio.math.toronto.edu/wiki/index.php/Wave_equations
are very interested to include such a functionality.
I don't hope to start a flame war, but may be the authors of wikitex and blahtex could outline the differences of features of their programs? Or does such a comparison already exit?
I don't think there's any danger of a flame war... we're all reasonable people :-)
No-one has done a detailed comparison as far as I know. I haven't actually tried wikitex. From what I understand, it implements a much fuller subset of tex/latex than blahtex will ever do. From the beginning I wrote blahtex to use the same security model as texvc (i.e. whitelist a set of commands, fully parse the input before sending it off to tex/latex). Wikitex uses a different security model, it somehow allows much lower-level stuff through. I don't fully understand how they ensure this is a safe thing to do, although I believe they claim that it is safe, and I'm sure they can explain this in detail.
A consequence of Wikitex doing things at this lower level is that they can apparently use just about any latex package they like. Whereas blahtex needs to be told explicitly which commands to let through, and how to translate them to MathML.
Blahtex does MathML output, I don't think Wikitex does, but I could be mistaken. I think that when the STIX fonts are released, there will be a flurry of activity and MathML will soon become a much better way of distributing mathematics on the web than via PNG graphics. But that's still some time off. And even then, there are still plenty of things that can't be done with MathML (for example even simple commutative diagrams can be painful). Although I should point out that a committee was recently convened to start work on MathML 3.0, which may address some of these issues.
David
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