From: John Dorian<jm.dorian(a)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…
[5]
http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/
[6]
http://dlmf.nist.gov/