Re: How Do I Render Unicode Math Symbols in a Web Browser?

David,

Thx for the response. I'll follow up on and both the direct font approach 
and the MathML approach. 

I noticed that in 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-MathML2-20031021/chapter2.html#fund.examples 
you use images instead of a MathML renderer. Why did you make that choice? 
I think our situations are similar since we are both publishing W3C specs. 
One consideration is that the spec must be easily viewed. Do you consider 
that prerequing a MathML renderer poses an unacceptable requirement for 
W3C specs? Do you have an example of a W3C spec that uses a MathML 
renderer?

Arthur Ryman,
Rational Desktop Tools Development

phone: +1-905-413-3077, TL 969-3077
assistant: +1-905-413-2411, TL 969-2411
fax: +1-905-413-4920, TL 969-4920
mobile: +1-416-939-5063
intranet: http://labweb.torolab.ibm.com/DRY6/



David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> 
Sent by: www-math-request@w3.org
09/09/2004 12:15 PM

To
Arthur Ryman/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA
cc
www-math@w3.org
Subject
Re: How Do I Render Unicode Math Symbols in a Web Browser?








> My alternative is to use bitmaps but that has several drawbacks.

You could of course use MathML, which doesn't entirely free you from
worrying about installed fonts but does provide a more robust way to
access mathematical typographic requirements. Although simple cases
you may be able to get by with just accessing the foints and using
textual markup using mathml rendering, which is built in to
mozilla/netscape and freely available as a a behaviour extension for IE
(MathPlayer from Design Science). You could then access Z as
<mi>&#x2124;</mi>
or
<mi mathvariant="double-struck">Z</mi>


> Are there any fonts available to render this and other math symbols 
> defined in Unicode? Here's the list of symbols I'm looking for:Many do 
get 
> rendered in at least Mozilla, but not all. Can I specify some fonts so 
> that all symbols get rendered in both browsers?

the TeX, Wolfram, and Design Science Math fonts are all usable by
mozilla's MathML renderer, see
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/
Note that these fonts are not naturally unicode encoded so you have to
use mathml markup to access them and mozilla's mathml engine maintains
tables that map the unicode slots to font positions for these specific
"known" math fonts.

David

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