Re: Whither MathML support?

Bill,

Thanks for the feedback.  This is very useful and educational.  I, for one,
am in favor of keeping MathML as a first-class citizen in Readium, including
R2.  I look forward to more widespread use of MathML in EPUBs.  When it
works, it looks very good.  Still worried about accessibility, but there
doesn¹t appear a good solution there.

I simply can¹t imagine how voice-over or JAWS or any other assistive tech
would voice

But perhaps I need more education.

Again, thanks for the feedback.  Much appreciated.

Ric


From:  Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>
Date:  Wednesday, September 6, 2017 at 2:42 PM
To:  Ric Wright <rkwright@geofx.com>, W3C Publishing Business Group
<public-publishingbg@w3.org>
Subject:  RE: Whither MathML support?

I hit send too quickly. Small correction: we supply XML, which includes the
MathML, and the images of the equations created from the MathML,  to PLOS
and _they_ convert it to HTML for online. They are working on implementing
MathJax at PLOS but don¹t currently use it live.
 
Bill Kasdorf
VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage
p:734-904-6252  m:  734-904-6252
ISNI:http://isni.org/isni/0000000116490786
ORCiD:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786
<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786?lang=en>
 
 

From: Bill Kasdorf 
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2017 3:39 PM
To: Ric Wright; W3C Publishing Business Group
Subject: RE: Whither MathML support?
 
I¹ll reply from the point of view of a major conversion and prepress vendor,
Apex, which is the company I work for. And this is true of all of the other
main prepress and conversion vendors that I know of. WRT:
* What is current publishing views on these questions?  Are the major
publishers and/or journals actually using MathML?  It is not easy to find
examples of the use of MathML (and most are very old) which suggests that it
is not widely used.
Yipes!
 
What I think you¹re saying is ³it is not easy to find examples of the use of
MathML _in EPUBs_.² That is true.
 
We create millions of equations as MathML, and so do our peers. It is
fundamental to how we do math. To cite just one journal (admittedly the
world¹s largest, PLOS), the first thing we do for _every equation_ is to
convert it to MathML, no matter what format it comes to us in. All the uses
of that math throughout the workflow, including images, are created from the
MathML, and it is embedded in the XML that is the basis for the entire
workflow. In the case of PLOS, as with many STM journals, that¹s JATS XML
(almost all STM journals deliver JATS XML, though not all use it as the
workflow format), but we also deliver all the content as HTML, and that
includes equations. (I can¹t swear that the MathML makes its way into the
HTML, but even if only images do, they were created from MathML.) That
amounts to thousands of articles _per month_ published on a daily basis, a
firehose of content. That¹s just one journal. The same thing is true of all
book and journal content we create. All. All MathML. University of Toronto
Press, for pete¹s sake? All MathML.
 
Virtually all math in scholarly publications now exists, at some point in
the workflow, as MathML. The problem is that it almost never gets into EPUBs
because the reading systems mess it up. (Plus almost no journals deliver
articles or issues as EPUBs, though that is about to change. In fact Atypon,
one of the world¹s leading hosting platforms for STM content, now owned by
Wiley, will do that in their upcoming release. And it¹s all based on
Readium.) We do what our customers tell us to do. So when they tell us not
to put the MathML into the EPUBs, we don¹t. But we always have it.
 
I interviewed other prepress/conversion vendors and publishers for an
article I recently wrote. Same story. They all have MathML for all their
equations. Always. The MathML just doesn¹t get into the EPUBs.
 
So please help make the world safe for MathML in EPUBs!!!
 
--Bill K
 
Bill Kasdorf
VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage
p:734-904-6252  m:  734-904-6252
ISNI:http://isni.org/isni/0000000116490786
ORCiD:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786
<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786?lang=en>
 
 

From: Ric Wright [mailto:rkwright@geofx.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2017 2:55 PM
To: W3C Publishing Business Group
Subject: Whither MathML support?
 

(This question is a little self-serving (well, maybe a lot self-serving :-)
but just trying to leverage the deep experience and knowledge of this group.
Please feel free to ignore this post).

 

I know it¹s early days and it could be construed as more of a EPUB-specific
issue, but Readium is hard at work (and making good progress) on Readium-2
which is envisioned as ultimately being a successor to the current
Readium-1. One aspect we have been debating concerns support for MathML
<https://www.w3.org/Math/> .  Do note that we are talking here of the
rendering of MathML, not the semantic markup.

 

In Readium-1, we use MathJax <https://www.mathjax.org/>  to provide support
for MathML by injecting SVG.  We do this no matter which browser engine is
being used and ignoring whether MathML is even present in the EPUB. Both
decisions arose largely from expediency. We use the SVG output form from
MathJax which is all paths, so completely inaccessible, but works very well.

 

Now, with Readium-2 (R2), we are considering two options:
* Only inject MathJax IFF the EPUB/WP has MathML (EPUB requires it be
declared in the manifest) and the browser is considered poor at rendering
MathML (which at present is all but Safari).
* Drop support for MathML entirely.
There are arguments to be made on both sides. MathML is required by the EPUB
spec and R1 supports it so why go backwards?  OTOH, how much is MathML
really used?  Plus, given the architecture of R2 it would not be too
difficult to simply provide implementers the instructions of how to inject
the necessary support so it could be an optional feature.

 

This discussion is of course primarily a reading-system issue, but what we
would very much appreciate feedback from those willing to  provide it is:
* Given that the MathML spec seems to be, well, a bit stale (3.5 years since
last update) what is the long-term view of its viability?
* Given the difficulty of making it accessible, does it make sense to try
and provide markup that is accessible or just throw in the towel and provide
bitmaps ­ or use a tool like MathJax on the server (or production time) and
generate SVG or HTML/CSS then?
* What is current publishing views on these questions?  Are the major
publishers and/or journals actually using MathML?  It is not easy to find
examples of the use of MathML (and most are very old) which suggests that it
is not widely used.
Thoughts?

 

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

 

Ric