[Mediawiki-l] future planning for math/equations in mediawiki

[Lee Worden]

> From: John Dorian<jm.dorian at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] future planning for math/equations in mediawiki
>
> I'm hoping to get some advice or perspectives so I don't overlook something.
> I'm looking to future-plan for math/equations in a mediawiki environment.
>
[...]
> In general:
> - MathML is supported natively by Firefox, and probably WebKit (Safari)
> eventually
> - TeX is not likely to be native supported, and will require some sort of
> conversion for (X)HTML environments
>
> which looks like a win for MathML
>
> However,_right_  now, TeX has better support in MediaWiki
> (for what I find odd reasons)
> The methods that work now are:
>
> 1. texvc - works, but generating bitmapped PNGs is suboptimal and not what I
> have in mind for the future in terms of scalable typesetting
>
> 2. MathJax (two sub-methods):
[...]
> Am I the only one who finds this odd - that I can't write MathML input, but yet
> mediawiki and MathJax are moving with browsers to having MathML as the rendered
> output?
>
> This seems like a waste - I have to worry writing nice TeX, then worry about how
> it is converted by MathJax to MathML, and any possible bugs in that conversion
> process - when I could just write MathML and have only to worry about how
> Firefox renders it.
>
> What advice do people have about a "good way" (simple, future compatible, least
> likely to break with converters) to deal with math/equations in mediawiki?
>
> Thank you in advance for your thoughts and insight.

MathML is generally considered too cumbersome for writing by hand, and 
in fact it wasn't designed to be written by hand [1].  TeX seems to be 
the most popular format for authoring math to be translated to MathML, 
though there are other ways [2].

Along with the two MediaWiki extensions you mention, WorkingWiki [3] 
also provides TeX-to-MathML translation [4] similar to what texvc 
provides.  It uses LaTeXML [5] to do the translation, a third-party tool 
that was developed to create the online version of the standard Handbook 
of Mathematical Functions [6].

WorkingWiki does substantially more than translate math expressions, but 
it should be possible to create an inline-math-only option if there was 
demand.

Lee Worden
McMaster University / UC Berkeley
http://leeworden.net

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathml#cite_note-1
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathml#Software_support
[3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WorkingWiki
[4] 
http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/projects/index.php/WorkingWiki/Tutorial#Inline_LaTeX_commands
[5] http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/
[6] http://dlmf.nist.gov/