Re: [math-on-web] CG meeting minutes, 2018/01/18

 

Hi !

I try to follow your discussions. I wanted to post a small commentary to
try to progress. I hope not to disturb this exchange thread.

The mathematic notation on web and others support like mails ou sms are
the user adoption. I'm a teacher and my dream is to exchange mathematic
SMS with collegues or students.

On my authoring tool that I try to developp, I realised that I need
three interfaces :
- An user interface : "Write As You Speak or Heard", "3 times 12" in
english, "3 fois 12" in french, ... . I think this is the only way to be
fast adoped.
- An internal interface to display or save formula : MathML presentation
markup or Latex.
- And finaly an other internal interface to exchange formula with other
applications : MathML content markup.

Common Users don't have to deal with complex Markup and we need them to
generalise mathematic on web : JavaFX support MathML but the display has
been broken since 7 ans. The developpment team answer me that it not a
priority bug !

https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8147476

I have a dream, I hope that one day, many angry user mails will change
this :-)

Displaying streching characters is also a problem. I found that
Java/Swing solution was interresting. In some configurations it's allow
to mixed glyphs from fonts and user glyph drawing. In fact all glyphs
are curves, we can use a specific application (like Harfbuzz) to draw it
or draw "by hand" for complexe glyph. I don't understand why nobody
achieved to extend Donald Knuth approch with TextFont. As you discribe
it, most of rendering mathematic application use different font sizes
first and many glyphs for higher characters (exactly as Knuth several
years ago). But computers speed is faster than in the past and we should
be able to draw directly stretching glyphs.

Guy. 

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Le 2018-01-25 18:54, Peter Krautzberger a écrit : 

> Hi everyone, 
> 
> The minutes are blow. 
> 
> The next meeting will be on Feb 1 and we will focus on kick-starting the task forces for 2018. 
> 
> Best, 
> Peter. 
> 
> # MathOnWeb CG 2018-01-18
> 
> * Volker: didn't write a comment; it would have been "let's not re-hash the same old discussions every week"
> * Dani: I think F2F will be best to sort some things out
> * Peter:
> * review call for comments
> * plan potential task forces for 2018
> * Neil: font improvements are interesting. Anyone interested?
> * Volker:
> * Arno: only have one font b/c I can't get access to metrics of fonts
> * interesting beyond equations
> * reference for other work?
> * Peter: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/font-metrics-api/2417 [1]
> * Neil: is Houdini alive?
> * Peter: yes. Look up Tab Atkins
> * Dani: for equation display, I see two approaches
> * 1) no JS. I.e., HTML+CSS
> * 2) with JS. Then have to compute metrics
> * Neil: right. metrics means client-Side JS
> * Peter: though Houdini sits in between as it uses JS for new CSS, claims its path towards new CSS features
> * Arno: editing obviously needs JS
> * Think we need both and they might differ
> * Dani: agreed. It's just that it requires different task forces
> * Peter: agreed, while I wished it wasn't the case
> * ideally, client and server-side rendering would be identical
> * Peter: @Dani so propose two task forces for client / server rendering?
> * Dani: yes but I personally more on server-side
> * Peter: is there interest in purely client-side rendering (web components, Houdini)?
> * Neil: I'd be interested but have no plans
> * Peter: you might want to talk to the developer of fmath
> * Neil: promise to write a comment
> * Volker: interested in ARIA spec for navigation
> * Dani: I'd be interested in that
> * Dani: if we can come up with a unified vision for mathematics, then we can try to bring that to TPAC for feedback
> * Dani: we come across as divided
> * Neil: it would be good to take one piece of CSS and try to get wider support from web devs
> * Peter: makes sense; it's what I've been trying to do and continue
> * Neil: stretchy characters might be another
> * Peter: anyone interested?
> * Neil: strike-through might be another
> * Arno: interested
> * Arno: my email had two CSS definitions
> * stretchy
> * menclose-like notations (crossing out etc)
> * Dani: I think we need to document how people are doing things right now
> * ACTION: Peter should start with collecting that
> * Peter: should we set up two meetings, both bi-weekly?
> * ACTION send out test doodles
> * ACTION:
> * @Everyone start your task forces
> * @task forces: start gathering existing techniques
> * @Arno write email about ideas for common abstract format needs

 

Links:
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[1] https://discourse.wicg.io/t/font-metrics-api/2417