Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Reduce math rendering preferences 2

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.