On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You can force png rendering both by preferences and
by code. But what's
more interesting is the use of badly documented \scriptstyle TeX tag, which
generates a much smaller and less "invasive" display of pngs:
The use of scriptstyle to control font size is an ugly hack that makes
many formulas less readable. For example, <math>2^{A_C}\,</math> and
<math>2^{A}C\,</math> become much harder to distinguish in
scriptstyle.
In a custom installation, you can tweak the font size in images by
changing the value of the "-D" parameter in line 8 of render.ml and
recompiling texvc.
The ideal solution for Wikipedia would be to move to a system in which
users with relatively modern browsers don't see images at all. There
is already a candidate for that system: MathJax. This has extensive
browser compatibility [1] and is actively maintained, with some
big-name sponsors behind it [2]. The main difficulties enabling it on
WIkipedia would be configuration and checking for any inconsistencies
with texvc (so the main limitation is developer interest). On a
custom install without a huge base of existing text, you could
probably just use Extension:MathJax, although I haven't tried it.
- Carl
1:
http://www.mathjax.org/resources/browser-compatibility/
2:
http://www.mathjax.org/sponsors/