RE: Hindawi responsive equations

I just realized I had never passed this on to the DPUB IG as Ivan had suggested I should.

From: Ivan Herman [mailto:ivan@w3.org]
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2015 5:35 AM
To: Bill Kasdorf
Cc: Tzviya Siegman; Markus Gylling; Dave Cramer; ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com
Subject: Re: Hindawi responsive equations

This looks great indeed. Actually, I think it is an illustration of the approach Peter was talking about: what I presume Ahmed does is to do a server side processing of the mathematics (MathML or LaTeX) and generate the SVG+CSS combination. And the equations nicely reformat themselves indeed when the size of the window changes, which is great…

Of course, the major problem, as also raised by Peter, is accessibility. The SVG is purely graphics (as it should be), meaning that the equations themselves loose all their original semantics. But that is not Ahmed's fault; there is a missing piece here in the technology chain…

Bill, I would think that it would be worth sharing this with the DPUB IG as a whole. I cannot, of course, comment on the EPUB 3.1 Working Group…

Ivan




On 2 Dec 2015, at 17:32, Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com<mailto:bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>> wrote:

Copying you on an e-mail I just sent to Peter.

I'll be very interested in your take on this.

BTW I was in the process of getting Paul Peters, who now leads Hindawi Publishing, on our journals subgroup for EPUB 3.1, but the group evaporated too fast, before I could get that accomplished. I mentioned to Paul yesterday (at the STM event I spoke at) that we should revisit involving Hindawi, and perhaps on the DPUB IG even more than the EPUB 3.1 WG (though they'd be valuable to both).

An interesting piece of EPUB cred for Ahmed ;-): I speak at this STM event in London the first week of December basically every year. Of course my topic was EPUB 3 the year we published that; the spec was pretty brand new at the time. Without Ahmed knowing it, I used Hindawi journal content as an example because _he had already published articles as EPUB with SVG equations_. Beautiful complex mathy EPUBs. We are talking a couple months after the spec was finalized. You should have seen the look on Ahmed's face when he saw his own EPUB up on the screen as I was stressing the point that _yes this is even for STM content, it's not just for trade books: have a look at this, will ya!_. Way back then.

Ahmed is a very unusual successful publishing CEO that is _also_ a mathematician and _also_ loves to actually get deep into CSS land. . . .

For full disclosure purposes I've copied Ahmed on this so he knows what I'm saying about him.

--Bill

From: Bill Kasdorf
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2015 11:19 AM
To: Peter Krautzberger (peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org<mailto:peter.krautzberger@mathjax.org>)
Cc: 'ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com<mailto:ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com>'
Subject: Hindawi responsive equations

Hi, Peter—

My friend Ahmed Hindawi (of Hindawi publishing, which I presume you know about—they are mainly or possibly exclusively a math publisher, based in Cairo) gave a very interesting demo of a technology he's developed for rendering MathML into responsive equations.

While it does not use MathJax (or even JavaScript), I thought you'd want to take a look at this, and to read the paper he will be publishing on the details in a month or so. Ahmed is a mathematician, so he is particularly well qualified to build math-specific logic into this. Despite the fact that this obviously overlaps with the responsive equations MathJax has been developing, I thought you might be interested in both that logic and also looking under the hood, especially at the CSS statements, when they are available. He will be making all this open source.

I alerted Greg at Apex to this earlier today. Here's the summary I sent him:
. . .
Ahmed Hindawi gave a presentation on a technology he's developed for rendering reflowable, responsive math that looks very cool. He is a mathematician, as you may know, and so he has built very good logic into it in terms of how to deconstruct equations into nested structures, prioritize break points, and even generate "implied" operators that are needed at a break but aren't in the base equation. It is all done with CSS, SVG, and Media Queries—no JavaScript. (Key point: the result isn't one SVG, it's a bunch of little SVGs.) It consists of these steps:
--Equation Analyzer breaks the equation up into units, including nested structures, and _measures_ all the pieces;
--Equation Renderer takes a target width and does cascade matching based on the structure and measurements;
--Equation Blockalizer prioritizes the groupings given the available width;
--Equation Maker renders the equation based on SVG Blocks + Media Queries + CSS statements.
He is going to publish a paper on it with all the technical details in the next month or so, and will be making it all open source. There's a demo at http://www.responsiveequations.com/.

. . .

I copied that literally so that Ahmed, whom I've copied on this, can correct me if I've mis-stated or misunderstood something.

I encouraged Ahmed to be in touch with you and to revisit the issue of supporting MathJax. While he declined to do that years ago, a lot has happened since then and your 2.6 version certainly will be of interest to him. So now you have each other's e-mails. When I think of go-to people for anything regarding math, MathML, and math rendering, you two are at the top of the list (well, ok, along with Greg) so the two of you should know each other in any case.

And btw I _did_ expand the MathJax update to two slides in my presentation and included the pitch for sponsorship. Since you should probably see what I said (though it was all based on what you told me, which of course I acknowledged in my presentation), I've attached it.

--Bill

Bill Kasdorf
Vice President, Apex Content Solutions
Apex CoVantage
W: +1 734-904-6252
M: +1 734-904-6252
@BillKasdorf<http://twitter.com/#!/BillKasdorf>
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http://isni.org/isni/0000000116490786

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786?lang=en>
www.apexcovantage.com<http://www.apexcovantage.com/>

<image003.jpg>

<The Convergence Continues (Rev. 1.0).pdf>


----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

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ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704