Re: auto-boxing

Hi Paul,

Nice showcase of a limitation! And I feel good when I can fully agree with
Neil :-)

Re: "Word has influenced my mathematical discourse!."

Indeed, as would any tool. I've had this reaction many times for
"PDF (acrobat reader) has influenced my mathematical discourse!."

when I couldn't copy anything of value from non-trivial math expressions.
Modern OCR tools have finally solved this, by completely disregarding the
format itself.

As to the mrows. I tend to reexamine most mrow-in-MathML statements as
span-in-HTML statements to check if the intuition holds (this is personal
taste). So if I frame things as:
"tools shouldn't auto-add spans, because it harms the HTML clipboard"

that sounds like misplaced emphasis to me. Instead, I will second Neil that
Word should get better with "ill-formed selections" and in particular
"ill-formed cut", both in sanitizing the content that enters the clipboard,
and sanitizing the remaining subexpression that remains in the page. Then
it could allow you to do what feels natural to an author.

In a case where the Word dev team doesn't have desire or resources to ship
such an upgrade, you could use something like MathPix on the open window of
your Word document and grab the (sub-)expression through OCR over the right
selection of pixels. And paste it back into Word (or anywhere else) as a
flat presentation MathML snippet, which MathPix offers nowadays. It should
be ~5-10 seconds slower than doing it inside Word itself, but is a pretty
solid workaround.

Tools compete. But if using mrows is just "as simple" and just "as hard" as
using HTML spans, I think that's a good place to be for now.

Greetings,
Deyan


On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 3:47 PM Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Paul,
>
> I don't think I understand your issue:
>
>    - If the MathML generated by the new expression is wrong, that is
>    simply a bug.
>    - If you are saying that you don't like the way Word's editor or some
>    other editor works with selection/copy/paste, that's a UI issue and is
>    independent of MathML. Some editors might only allow certain edits, and
>    others might be more free. E.g., Mathematica's editor (full disclosure, I
>    wrote that one) is completely freeform wrt to linear notations. It seems
>    that Word's editor won't allow selection of part of the interior of parens
>    that extends beyond the parens; that's not a MathML limitation and might be
>    considered a feature by some (only allow syntactically meaningful
>    selections?)
>
> I think a simple way to break up the first expr is to select all of it,
> copy/paste it to the right and then delete the contents of parens as
> appropriate. Seems pretty easy and quick. Then add a '2' in front of the
> '5's (could have done this first and saved inserting a char). Of course,
> everyone's editing style differs.
>
> In the end, I'm not clear why this is a MathML issue but I am likely
> misunderstanding your issue.
>
>     Neil
>
>
>
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> On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 8:28 AM Paul Libbrecht <paul@hoplahup.net> wrote:
>
>> Hello dear list,
>>
>> I had a funny demo yesterday in my lecture.
>>
>> I had input the following in Word: P(T<-t∨T>t)=0.05:
>>
>> However, a colleague that watched indicated I should rather split the
>> probability measures in two which I started:
>>
>> Splitting the formula by using cut and paste was not possible anymore,
>> because an automatic box (an mrow I assume) had appeared inside the
>> first bracket. Only partial cut and paste was possible.
>>
>> So it was easier to re-input the whole or abandon the change; I chose the
>> second ;-). Word has influenced my mathematical discourse!.
>>
>> A few discussions around intents seem to imply that these boxes are a
>> natural requirement which is understandable from the perspective of a
>> navigation through the formula or read-aloud or a selection-aware
>> presentation_. I would like to agree with that but this implies that some
>> boxes will bother the mathematical discourse.
>>
>> I believe that similar issues are met in other environments (in
>> particular TeXmacs has very deep box-nesting.
>>
>>    - Should users expect “box manipulations” so that the boxes become
>>    correct?
>>    - Should they be told to care?
>>    - Are there situations where boxes would overlap?
>>
>> paul
>>
>