Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:04:54 UTC
I think it would be a great idea if we could implement some of Maynard Handley's suggestions listed here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Displaying_a_formula#Maynard_Handley.27s_suggestions . That would solve most of the problems of using <math> PNG images. He includes ways to make transparant PNG images, make font-sized PNG images, and fix the vertical alignment.
As discussed over the previous several years: * Transparency is unsafe, as the foreground color won't match with overridden background colors. This leads to illegible black-on-black text, etc. * Sizing with fonts is similarly infeasible as font size may vary significantly, and it's far too slow to rerender the images even if you could detect the font size properly in the browser. Better math output will be achieved only with improved MathML support.
(In reply to comment #1) > * Sizing with fonts is similarly infeasible as font size may vary > significantly, and it's far too slow to rerender the images even > if you could detect the font size properly in the browser. The suggestion was to define image height/width inline with <img style="..."> in CSS exes rather than leaving out the size or specifying it in pixels. That might work reasonably well, but would require testing on various platforms.
That would also look horrible.
What about adding another command to TeX, such as "\small" that would render the images smaller. Right now, it's not a huge problem, but my main concern is square roots. Right now they display way too large for inline PNG and look too ugly in HTML. Even a \smallrt (small root) command would help.
&sqrt;<span style="text-decoration: overline;">2</span> looks fine to me. It looks ugly, granted, so make a template.
Did you check that out on IE? It works perfectly in Firefox, but looks completely horrible in IE.
(In reply to comment #6) > Did you check that out on IE? It works perfectly in Firefox, but looks completely horrible in IE. There's a gap of a couple of pixels, but provided you {{unicode}} it, it's more "a bit annoying" than "completely horrible". Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Simetrical/Sandbox&oldid=60093706
Oh yes, you're right. If you {{unicode}} it is works fine. I'm going to create a template right now called {{sqrt}}.
