Talk:Requests for comment/Reduce math rendering preferences 2

I can't tell if the other discussion section is trying to say the same thing or not, but simply replacing the PNG renderer with an SVG renderer would be a good thing. As noted elsewhere, PNG is rather ugly in some (many?) cases.

I think this could replace the old HTML/MathML solutions (removed from MW 1.19 in 2012). Modern and clever idea, which could make formulas selectable (copy-paste-able). Thumbs up

This assumes that (1) HTML rendering is dropped (e.g., no more "HTML if possible"), and (2) it is considered acceptable to download images just to replace them shortly after, e.g., by MathJax output.

This option shouldn't be removed, since it has a significant and well-defined functionality, which doesn't hurt anyone and is useful to a few people.

When i replied about it on wikitech-l, i knew one university professor that used it. Since then i found one more such person.

In fact, you can just check how many people actually use it (in each of the 800+ projects). If it's more than zero, keep it.

I don't care what you do, but remember to say

BLA_BLA (Recommended for modern browsers)

not just

Recommended for modern browsers

else nobody can figure out what kind of medicine you propose to slip in their drink. Yes, one line should be suffixed "(default)" or "(recommended)". OK, you can say

let mother decide

or

site default

or something, but just don't say

Recommended for modern browsers

intemixed with nouns on the other lines.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Jidanni.

Yeah we're just going to kill that option... nobody knows what it means. ;)

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Brion VIBBER.

in the current discussion on the Math 2.0 forum the favored tool for converting latex to mathml safely is iTex.

This post was posted by Lee Worden, but signed as Wonder.

LaTeXML may also be a possibility: produces good PNG and MathML. Is being actively developed. Can run as a daemon to convert latex to rendered math efficiently. According to the author, does not currently produce baseline information but could be modified to do it.

This post was posted by Lee Worden, but signed as Wonder.

IMHO, the default setting should encourage authors to use the <math>-tags whenever they typeset math: <math>2^x</math> is a standardized way to typeset math (as opposed to HTML where you could write the same as 2<sup>x</sup> or using a styled <span> tag etc.) and thus easily machine-readable, i.e. can be automatically adapted to a new rendering method, if ever implemented. Even now, many authors avoid using the <math> tag even for simple formulas due to the previously stated $\text{ obvious problems with inline PNG rendering}\,$. Making PNG rendering the default setting would make things worse. I'd suggest you either resolve the baseline/size problems prior to making this change or boost a promising alternative such as mathJax.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Pberndt.

Making PNG rendering the default setting wouldn't make things worse as HTML formatted math would stay as such. A main problem with the "HTML if possible" options is that math tag HTML rendering is horribly broken.

The change would encourage authors to favor manual HTML-formatting over <math> tags for inline formulas. From a semantics point of view, that's worse.

Indeed.

From a semantic point of view, the current part-HTML-part-PNG solutions are all "worse". ;) In fact, the MOS for math articles on the English Wikipedia does encourage HTML for inline math because of the issues with PNG rendering. Nageh 19:02, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

IMO semantics at source code level is more important than semantics of the HTML code after rendering. It is easy to fix flawed rendering of TeX-Code by replacing the current renderer with a better one, once one is available. But it might turn out to be pretty hard to automatically recover the semantics (in mathematical means) from HTML code - which could become necessary if someone wants to port Wikipedia to a different platform (i.e. non-browser), improve the PDF renderer, etc.

I understand what you mean, and I agree. Obviously, there is a trade-off between nicer HTML rendering and future-proof TeX code. But note that we've got the {{math}} template, which can retain (at least) part of the semantics you desire. Of course, this would assume its consistent use... which is not the case. :/

2^x is not how you'd write it in html. You would write 2^''x'', with the x italicized. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MOSMATH. Michael Hardy 18:48, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

I have now notified the mathJax software developers of the existence of this present page and the one at this URL. I'd really like to see mathJax brought up to the state in which it can make sense to just force everyone who reads Wikipedia math articles to use mathJax. This page elicited some support for that. But it's a page for people discussing how to edit, develop, and maintain Wikipedia's math articles, not for software developers who can actually do something about the software. The software developers (both those who read pages like the present one and those who work on mathJax) need to know what the needs are from the point of view of the people who post to those pages. Robert Miner at mathJax.org, who is interested in supporting Wikipedia, now knows about the following pages, and so should everyone here:

• w:en:User_talk:Nageh/mathJax
• w:en:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics
• w:en:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive/2011/Jul
• this present page

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

On 25 June 2011, David Eppstein wrote in this discussion:

I would very much like to see mathjax become standard for Wikipedia math formatting, so that no special user-preference tweaking is required; it works well on the other sites I've used that use it (e.g. mathoverflow and mathscinet) and looks a lot better a lot more consistently than the alternatives.

It appears to me that would solve the problems everyone's been griping and arguing about on that discussion page since 2003, provided some bugs can be fixed. Bugs are listed at w:en:User_talk:Nageh/mathJax. Those need to get fixed by software people at mathJax.org, who are now aware of that page and are interested in Wikipedia's adopting David Eppstein's suggestion.

The other thing that would need to get done would be done by those who edit the software that Wikipedia uses.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

Just to make it clear: The mathJax user script currently relies on the "Leave it as TeX" rendering option. It would be easy to change this so the alt tag of the PNG output (setting "Always render PNG") would be processed... but it seemed a bit pointless to show images for fractions of a second just before they are replaced by MathJax output. This could be used as a fall-back for users that don't have JavaScript activated though I would suggest a more intelligent solution.

Now I remember: I had to choose "leave it as TeX" and also install a file called vector.js or something like that, which I copied from somewhere. So apparently if the "leave it as TeX" option isn't there, then mathJax won't work for me for now. Michael Hardy 17:08, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Re I'd really like to see mathJax brought up to the state in which it can make sense to just force everyone who reads Wikipedia math articles to use mathJax: please don't force people to use a particular technology: that goes against many principles underlying the web. By all means let's have it as a default once the bugs are ironed out, but I don't see a strong reason to remove the PNG and HTML options entirely; there will always be a few oddballs who want those things for one reason or another.

Everyone is "forced" to use certain technologies when they read any Wikipedia page or any web page. Even when there are several options and they can choose one as their preference from a menu, they're "forced" to use only those available in the menu. (But maybe making it the default is the right way to go.) Michael Hardy 23:48, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Can't we enable MathJax as a "beta" option, disabled by default? Is that a possibility?

This post was posted by Markovnikov~mediawikiwiki, but signed as Markovnikov.

So folks know: while one option is to have MathJax parse tex expressions and display them, it's also possible to produce mathml on the server side and have MathJax display it in the browser, which addresses the problem of browsers that can't display mathml themselves, while avoiding any quirks of MathJax's tex parsing.

This post was posted by Lee Worden, but signed as Wonder.

I would think the bigger quirks are with the MathML rendering as implemented in browsers. Even Firefox's implementation, which is supposedly the most complete implementation among browser, is missing essential functionality like negative spaces. As such, using MathJax to directly parse from the TeX source is still the better option.

Nageh - parsing TeX to MathML on the server and using MathJax to display the MathML, instead of the browser's MathML implementation, would also address the quirks issue to the same degree as your proposal, and might be more efficient because the MathML could be cached for reuse.

This post was posted by Lee Worden, but signed as Wonder.

I see what you mean. That is certainly a feasible solution as well, and would definitely render faster than typesetting from TeX.

From my perhaps idiosyncratic point of view, the most obvious issues are these:

• "Displayed", as opposed to "inline" TeX looks very good in Wikipedia articles, but "inline" TeX usually looks about three or four times as big as the surrounding text, and that looks buffoonish.
• In "inline" TeX, simple things like a^b and a_b are formatted wrong: obviously in both cases the a should be at the same level as the surrounding text and the b respectively higher or lower.
• Making everyone use mathJax may be the solution, but mathJax still has bugs. Wikipedia needs more sophisticated behavior from mathJax than do other forums that use it, such as stackexchange and mathoverflow. For problems with the behavior of mathJax within Wikipedia, see this URL.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

This page may also shed some light (although much of what it deals with concerns quite different matters).

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

I find myself worrying that things like $a^b$ (<math>a^b</math>), which currently look just fine, will be turned into things like $a^b\,$ (<math>a^b\,</math>), which don't. It's simple formulas like these that get used most often outside of math articles, and while they look fine in HTML, they look terrible as PNGs because their baselines are wrong. E.g., in en:Chemistry we find, "The speed of a chemical reaction (at given temperature T) is related to the activation energy E, by the Boltzmann's population factor $e^{-E/kT}$", which doesn't look great but isn't awful. If we force PNG rendering then we get, "The speed of a chemical reaction (at given temperature T) is related to the activation energy E, by the Boltzmann's population factor $e^{-E/kT}\,$", which is atrocious. If not for baseline problems, I would support removing HTML rendering, but as it is I'm conflicted.

However, I would support reducing the number of possibilities down to three: TeX only, PNG only, and a single HTML option. There's no reason to have so many different HTML options. This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Ozob.

If not for baseline problems, I would support removing HTML rendering, but as it is I'm conflicted.

I agree.

HelderOzob, you say $a^b$ looks fine, but that actually depends on how the user's preferences are set. I recently went through the steps whose details I prefer not to remember just now (it involved creating a special file....) that caused me to see everything as mathJax makes it appear, so that now both $a^b$ and $a^b\,$ look good when I view them on Wikipedia, but the latter doesn't look good when I view it here.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

Actually, it was Ozob who said that =)

And in fact the result depends on the user preferences (for me both formulas are identical since I'm using "Always render PNG" at the moment), so I've added the wikicode on the side of his formulas to help other readers to understand what he said above.

Thank you, it's clearer with the wikicode next to it.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Ozob.

The other problem with $a^b\,$ (<math>a^b\,</math>), is the font sizes, if the base font size in the math png could be made to match the surrounding text, that would fix the other major rendering problem with current png rendering. It would also fix a problem with creating wikibooks which use a different fontsize.

Another issues with the current solution is the font choice and style. png rendering uses an italic serif font. The inline versions without math tags are typically san-serif which may or may not be italic, a^b (a<sup>b</sup>), or a^b (''a''<sup>b</sup>), or a^b (''a''<sup>''b''</sup>). Many users prefer this as the current inline png rendering looks so bad. This creates a very inconsistent typography as multiple techniques are used in the same article.

There have been some workaround solutions to the inline math problem w:Template:Math uses CSS styles so some effect, but use of this template is somewhat contentious and only favoured by a few editors. There actually a whole bunch of templates w:Category:Mathematical formatting templates which are partial solutions to math rendering deficiencies.

My biggest problem with PNG is that it looks bad at high zoom levels, which affects people with bad eyesight, people who just like big text, and the increasing number of people with high resolution screens. Having said that, I recognize that the other choices have problems too, so seems to me like we need to keep at least some of the preferences around, at least for the near future. Kingdon 00:59, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Based on feedback I've seen so far, it seems like the best short-term fixes will be along the line:

• modify texvc to provide baseline information to fix PNG positioning
  • this should reduce the worst problems with PNG math fitting poorly with inline text
• disable the old partial HTML & MathML modes
• keep the 'Leave as TeX' mode to be used with existing user scripts for MathJax

with medium- and long-term:

• give blahtex another look (PNG and proper MathML output to replace texvc?)
• see about cleaner integration of MathJax, with automatic fallback to PNG
  • track down a few more bugs with MathJax rendering before making it default

Anything else that should modify those priorities?

Support. Once we have a 95% solution on the PNG baselines, I think we can scrap the partial HTML and MathML modes.

Finally got back to working on this topic... I've removed the extra options (won't be live until 1.19 deploys, current target late January or Februrary). Baseline adjustment isn't in yet, but is in the works. Also started playing with MathJax, will write up some more notes as its own RFC in a bit.

Sounds good to me.

OT: Would it be possible to upload the MathJax web-fonts to the Wikimedia servers somewhere? Currently I am requesting users to point their web-font configuration to the MathJax CDN, but that is not intended to deal with high volumes (currently no problem, but possibly in the future... not that web-fonts would result in high traffic anyway.)

We should be able to get the whole library running from our optimized static-file server bits.wikimedia.org; once enabled by default it may well be highish traffic. :)

I'd rather not mess with it until we've got MathJax integrated in with Extension:Math as a progressive enhancement though; it'll be easier and more reliable to get it deployed if it's bundled together there.

Support.

To short term aim I'd also see if anything could be done about font-size matching with the texvc PNG.

MathJax can also produce MathML, not sure how the quality of this compares to the BlahTex output.

MathJax essentially uses MathML for its internal representation, so output is pretty much only dependent on the support of MathML by the browser. Even though FireFox has the most complete support of MathML it is still lacking in some regards.

And it should stay as default, if only for the sake of inline formulae. The HTML is not ugly, in fact, it is pretty straightforward. With proper CSS, as on enwiki, it is even rendered pretty decent. It is only the 'HTML if possible' that is ugly (using tables without a class).