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Old 11-27-2018, 10:59 PM   #16
Tex2002ans
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Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
To me it looks like they did just enough to mark off “MathML support” on a checklist without actually doing enough to make it useful.
Exactly. And boy, did the blogs/news sites eat that up.

Anyway, I contacted Peter soon after his ebookcraft talk. He invited me to the biweekly meetup of the Math on Web Pages W3C Community Group. (I showed up for a few months, haven't been in a while.)

Looks like next meeting will be December 6th (6PM CET). (Calendar here + Instructions here [looks like they switched to Zoom instead of Google Hangouts].)

There's people there discussing pros/cons of various methods, and working on tools/enhancements to what's currently out there (beyond MathML/MathJax).

Peter actually was the leader of MathJax for many years, and knows many of the pitfalls/disadvantages of that method.

And there are a bunch of other super knowledgeable maths people on the bleeding edge. Anyone else who's interested in better maths in their documents/ebooks should show up.
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Old 11-28-2018, 10:58 AM   #17
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Unfortunately, true support for mathml in browser engines was a victim of Google and Chrome. Google literally threw out all mathml support code when they forked Webkit. Google claimed the existing mathml code was insecure and that not many web pages used mathml. The first issue (security) has long been fixed. But Chrome/Google had decided on MathJax and no real support. The lack of websites that use mathml is of course a completely circular argument that makes no sense whatsoever giver few browsers supported it.

Right now Apple's webkit has good support for mathml, but Mozilla's browser engine easily has the best mathml support.

Not sure about native Windows browser engine support for mathml.

Sigil uses a special compressd version of MathJax to support mathml but only in Preview as Qt's old Webkit has not been upgraded to support mathml fully. Using newer Webkit's in Qt may help.
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Old 11-28-2018, 12:19 PM   #18
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Not sure about native Windows browser engine support for mathml.
Microsoft Edge doesn't support MathML.
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Old 11-28-2018, 09:53 PM   #19
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Right now Apple's webkit has good support for mathml, but Mozilla's browser engine easily has the best mathml support.
From what I learned reading Peter's blog + some email... MathML support in browsers was held together barely by ~ a single volunteer. No real resources were ever dedicated towards it by the browser vendors themselves. The codebase and bugs have been been languishing for years.

See his article, MathML is a failed web standard.

Soon after his ebookcraft talk, he was a tiny bit more hopeful (there was a developer from Apple in attendance). It seems like Apple (+ iBooks) are the only big players who may potentially be dedicated towards putting some amount of resources towards better MathML support.... but like the article stated, the vendors currently don't even give a fraction of a single developer towards it.

Note: To hear a slightly different take on it, there was a response article written: Response to Peter Krautzberger’s “MathML is a failed web standard”

Note #2: A lot of the MathML support comes from big academic publishers/universities, so it's mostly a "non-web" (Print) thing. There's also a Publishing group at W3C that covers a lot more of trying to get some legacy Print/Book stuff onto the web (I recall them trying to push for CSS to add print-centric float:top + float:bottom).

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Microsoft Edge doesn't support MathML.
Firefox is the only one left that has MathML support. The rest don't. (Like KevinH said, Chrome removed it a few years back "for security reasons".)

This is partially why MathJax was created, to create a JS library that could work cross-browser + generate images and/or super-hackish HTML+CSS on the fly. But it's super slow, and even that has some SERIOUS flaws (especially for Accessibility).

From what I could gather, the latest pushes in the Math on Web group are meeting with CSS to get some important functionality baked in (like stretchy characters [brackets, etc.]) + getting more relevant ARIA markup. (Intel I gathered by reading the minutes on the mailing list... I haven't been in the meetings in months though.)

Note: Three interesting results from the AIM workshop is a summary of an Accessibility in Math meeting that happened about a month ago. And 6 Thoughts on accessibility of equation layout summarizes some issues with current math solutions (x^2 spoken out loud might be "ex squared" or "ex to the power of 2" in Physics, but in Chemistry that would be a no go).

Last edited by Tex2002ans; 11-28-2018 at 10:12 PM.
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Old 12-01-2018, 02:18 AM   #20
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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
1. Can only Copy/Paste out MathML in newer versions of Word (>2007?), when they introduced the newer Equation Editor. I think you can only copy/paste one-at-a-time.......

When you open your DOCX with equations + Save As HTML, Word exports tiny PNGs. (According to what I know you don't even have control over final image size, etc.)

Toxaris can probably pop in and explain details... (I think automated MathML export is only available via APIs and can't be exported directly within Word?
You are almost right, it was introduced in Word 2010, but you need to activate/set this. You can choose if you want to copy an equation as MathML or in Linear format. Internally MS uses oMath, an extension of their OOXML standard. There is a resemblance to MathML, but it is not the same of course.
There is no built-in way to export only the equations. As you mention, Save as HTML will export them as PNG files.
There is no way to export MathML automatically via APIs.

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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
2. Toxaris's EPUBTools can also export MathML+SVG for you. This is the easiest/best way I know of currently.
Thank you. You can actually choose if you want MathML, SVG or both. I start from the MathML and create an SVG from that. There are some things that can be configured (like font and sizes), but not native from the GUI. That is because I rely on another program for the conversion. It is reasonably easy to convert those SVG or MathML to PNG. I am working on making PNG also an option, but not the PNG delivers by Word. Those are tiny and not that good.

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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
The subpar thing about those two workflows is that all the equations will be numbered sequentially:
  • image001.png for Word.
    • (I'm assuming equation images will get smushed together with normal images?)
  • Equation001.mml + Equation001.svg for EPUBTools

When you fully control the entire workflow from the start, you can give each equation human-readable names (VERY important when going to edit/add/change books in the future), and can control ALL the variables separately:
  • Font
  • DPI
  • Mathematical formatting conventions
    • Bold or italic vectors
  • [...].

This allows you to easily regenerate whatever materials you need.
Agree. The biggest issue is that equations within Word are not named, that metadata is not there. It is just a collection. Therefore I had to number them to make the process automatic. It is not ideal, I agree.
And you are right, if you have equations and images in Word, the Save as HTML function in Word will just rename the bunch of them as imagexxx.png as they appear in the text. Good luck in identifying...

My process is not ideal, but in my opinion an improvement. That being said, I don't believe most academics use Word with equations. Even if they did, it would be niche and therefore not very interesting to improve upon.
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Old 12-01-2018, 05:56 AM   #21
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There are some things that can be configured (like font and sizes), but not native from the GUI.
May be something nice to add.

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Originally Posted by Toxaris View Post
I am working on making PNG also an option, but not the PNG delivers by Word. Those are tiny and not that good.
That would also be a good setting. So then you could even have fallbacks for non-SVG ereaders.

And yeah, I couldn't believe the crappily low resolution equations when I Saved as HTML from Word... laughably bad.

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My process is not ideal, but in my opinion an improvement.
DEFINITELY.
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