RE: Math Working Group Charter

On the web fonts, I really didn’t have an agenda. I just know that math always has special requirements and there might be some areas where we need some help. Recently, a question came up about access to kerning info. Do webfonts currently allow JS code to access such things? Same with the MATH table. Although the webfonts implementation should make use of this data, might not JS code benefit from access to it as well?

Paul

From: Frédéric WANG [mailto:fred.wang@free.fr]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 11:39 AM
To: www-math@w3.org
Subject: Re: Math Working Group Charter

Le 18/02/2014 18:22, Paul Topping a écrit :

-          The apparent move away from XSL-FO toward CSS for so-called paged media, a subset of which is ebooks. There were two papers on this at last week’s XML Prague conference.
I think increasing compatibility with CSS should be an important goal and improvements in native MathML support could help to do that. For example, I'd like to see addressed the problem with <mstyle> that was already mentioned on this list in the past (BTW, Gecko will drop support for most of the unused attributes in the future). Also, the line breaking could be made more explicit about how to behave with respect to the CSS linebreaking. At the moment, there is not any MathML implementation that can handle the basic test case of linebreaking of math equations inside a HTML table.



-          Web fonts. There might be areas where this technology could be improved for math.
This is related to better CSS compatibility but I'm not sure what you have in mind here. Browsers have now converged towards the WOFF standard and (math) Web fonts can just be used normally in native MathML implementations. One of the current issue is that legacy fonts like STIXGeneral are split into many files and one has to explicitly list all of them in the CSS stylesheet, which is not very convenient for the Web authors. However, with Microsoft's Open Type MATH table that became the de facto standard and was submitted by Murray in January for standardization, we have a clean way to specify the desired math font and all its properties using a single file. So that's now more an implementation issue and that's what I'm working on for Gecko/WebKit MathML support. Font selection would then become as simple as this:

@font-face {
  font-family: LatinModernMathWOFF;
  src: local("Latin Modern Math"), url('latinmodern-math.woff');
}

math {
  font-family: LatinModernMathWOFF;
}

See http://www.maths-informatique-jeux.com/ulule/mathml_torture_test/.




--

Frédéric Wang

MathML Crowdfunding: ulule.com/mathematics-ebooks