Re: Agenda for teleconference Wednesday October 24, 2007

On Mittwoch, 24. Oktober 2007, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> From: "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Agenda for teleconference Wednesday October 24, 2007
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:08:56 -0400
>
> > "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> writes:
> > > From: Ian Horrocks <ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk>
> > > Subject: Agenda for teleconference Wednesday October 24, 2007
> > > Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:52:36 +0100
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > >            o PROPOSED: Documents to be edited using wiki markup
> > > > 		facilities (templates, tex math, etc). Revisit if there
> > > > 		are problems.
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > Real TeX, with everything?  Just TeX?  I would miss LaTeX math stuff.
> > > Is there a compact document on the capabilities we would be getting?
> >
> > AMS LaTeX, as per:
> >       http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula
>
> That page says:
>
> 	MediaWiki uses a subset of TeX markup, including some extensions
> 	from LaTeX and AMSLaTeX, for mathematical formulae. 

I think there is a whitelist of commands that are allowed in the wiki. This 
is, I think, a security issue (since TeX is a complex programming language 
that may have undesired side-effects when running user-built programs on the 
server).

> 	It generates 
> 	either PNG images or simple HTML markup, depending on user
> 	preferences and the complexity of the expression. In the future,
> 	as more browsers are smarter, it will be able to generate
> 	enhanced HTML or even MathML in many cases. (See blahtex for
> 	information about current work on adding MathML support.)
>
> 	More precisely, MediaWiki filters the markup through Texvc,
> 	which in turn passes the commands to TeX for the actual
> 	rendering. Thus, only a limited part of the full TeX language is
> 	supported; see below for details.
>
> >From this I take it that there are significant restrictions.  The web
>
> page describing the language accepted prints as 19 pages.
>
> I don't like the part about displaying as "PNG images".  This makes
> searching very difficult.

AFAIK the wiki builds its search index on the input text, not on the output 
HTML. Moreover, all the PNGs will have the (La)TeX code as an alternative 
text label (so that text-browsers can read stuff as well, and smart web 
searches may index it).

>
> I don't see anything about user-defined commands on the page, from which
> I take it that they are not allowed.  This is a very serious lack!  Of
> course, HTML also has a problem here.

This might be easy to fix, if we have a *fixed* set of common user-defined 
add-ons/packages to use in the wiki tex. We basically can change the preamble 
of the TeX that is used to make the formulae as we like. I do not know 
whether and how this could be done through the wiki, though.

-- Markus

>
> [...]
>
> >       -- Sandro



-- 
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362        fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
mak@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de        www  http://korrekt.org