I decided to move this discussion from the village pump to here.
|The result of <math> tags is ugly. The pictures are too big, and
|the ALT text shows the awful-looking raw markup when people move their
|mouse over it in most browsers. Any hope of some more user preferences
|in this area, hopefully with sensible defaults? -- [[User:Tim
|Starling|Tim Starling]]
|
|:I tend to agree on the size; font sizes can be manually bumped up on
|equations that really need it. (But the PNGs are limited to fixed
|pixel sizes, which does not have a guaranteed relation to a readable
|font size for any given user.) What other improvements would you
|suggest? I'm afraid "not ugly" and "more sensible" aren't
things we
|can code. ;) Eventually output as inline [[MathML]] is hoped for, but
|few browsers currently support it and we would need to beef up our
|wiki->HTML translator to produce proper XHTML. --[[User:Brion
|VIBBER|Brion]] 06:42 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
By "user preferences with sensible defaults", I just meant two more items in
the user preferences:
* TeX formulas display raw markup in ALT text
* TeX formula size
IMHO the first one should be off, and the second should line up with the
most common browser configuration. Whoever made [[Image:del.gif]] seemed to
be on the right track. As for other improvements: perhaps you could find
some way to convert most formulas to ASCII art and use that for the ALT
text. Maple can do it, why not Wikipedia? ;) That said, I think you guys
have more pressing matters. I made a feature suggestion on SourceForge a few
weeks ago requiring only a few extra lines of code, and AFAIK it hasn't been
touched.
I've heard rumours you can get JavaScript to tell you the font size in
pixels, but I'm not sure if they're true. Barring that, half-blind people
can probably find their way to the preferences and enlarge the formulas.
MathML sounds nice, although I can't stand messages in articles saying "if
the formulas on this page aren't displaying correctly, you need to get a
better browser", e.g. in [[Table of mathematical symbols]]. As long as we
don't get any more of them, I'll be happy.
-- Tim Starling.
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