New MathML ScreenshotThursday August 5th, 1999MathML is making great progress! Check out the new screenshot, and follow the progress in the mathml newsgroup. doesn't anyone find mozilla's so-called 'chrome' just plain ugly? (hopefully this will be fixed.) yeah, it's not that pretty. fortunately, it's all done using xul, so it can be changed on the fly. that sort of thing will be cleaned up later on in the game, but even if it's still not pretty enough for you, hey, go to the chromeZone... i'm betting that as the xul chrome spec becomes more stable (since it has changed from milestone to milestone) people out there will be making skins left and write, in the spirit of themes.org. i look forward to that. it's better than before thanks to those new menus that match everything else. Now even the menubars will be skinnable! weren't the scroll bars meant to be chromed as well? the GTK/windows scrollbars look out of place. I was just looking at the screenshot and thinking how *good* the chrome looks. A refeshing change from the too-busy icons of NS 4.x. But, as has been said, you'll be able to "chrome your own" anyway. Which is good, because, as you can see, there is no accounting for taste! :-) wow. looks very good. somebody want to enlighten us as to how it works? MathML is an XML language which allows you to display mathematical formulas correctly, such as the ones shown in the screen shot. You can use it in any XML document by using XML namespaces. It look quite capable with respect to what you can express, but the rendering leaves a lot to be desired. IMHO, people interested in rendering math should spend a few days with the TeXbook by Knuth. I don't believe you can get math people to use it if it does not looks right. Now specifics: Subscripts should be set in a smaller font. Subscripts to subscripts in an ever smaller one. Doing the same for superscripts should be good enough for most people. When a superscipt has a subscript, e.g., a^{u_b}, the placement of "u" should not be higher that for just "a^u". (Thing would be different if "b" was replaced with a large subformula, though.) Since math symbols are italics, this should influence the horizontal placement of superscripts and subscripts. Basically, A^u_d should have the "u" more to the right than the "d". Otherwise, symbols overlap. ()s should generally be sized based on what is inside. You might need a new tag for that. The spacing around binary operators is not even. On the scrrenshot "a+c" looks right, but "b+c" is awful. Don't forget that "/" has special spacing rules. The operator "*" should have the same centerline as "+". This stuff sounds like it could be set through CSS. When MathML is ready, they'll probably create a standard style sheet to apply nicer formatting to it. >It look quite capable with respect to what you can express, but the rendering leaves a lot to be desired. Yea, the longest journey starts with a single step. Most of what you say seem to suggest that you have been following the MathML newsgroup, where these limitations are pointed out, and marked as things to be resolved. There are many things going on deep down in the lizard, without specialized fonts that have a precise and math-aware font metrics system as TeX have. BTW, MathML is still work in progress, as other parts of Mozilla. --- RBS As Roger says we're just starting. He has code that carries out a lot of the basic operations needed to display maths (superscript, subscript, under, over, fraction, etc) but quality rendering takes time to implement. Getting good XP rendering of maths is tough, have patience! Hi, We're trying to get our MathML work landed at the moment but until that happens you might like to try out this patch (http://www.calm.hw.ac.uk/mathml/mathml-djf-19990801.diff.gz) against M7(works with a bit of fudge against M8). It's not our latest work which needs the pre-M9 source but it's close to the screenshot. enjoy, Dave Fiddes Mozilla MathML project One of thse days I'll figure out how to do http://www.calm.hw.ac.uk/mathml/mathml-djf-19990801.diff.gz it's worth repeating the fact that this important project is 100% non-Netscape Why don't these guys have cvs access yet? Roger does already to produce our web page http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/ and I will as soon as I get my form signed(I love boss people ;) We're currently negociating landing the code with the Layout guys...once it has landed we'll be able to develop stuff in CVS like everyone else... I hope! Why not use latex directly ?:) would solve a lot of things and we know that latex - tex source is bug free =) Anon, I asked the same question, and they told me that LaTeX (and such) does not understand the content of that is being displayed, as an XML implementation would. This seems to bring up all sorts of possiblilities, for editors and maybe even mathematical assistants and such. Could you imagine copying a couple of matricies out of a web page, pasting them into your MathML aware release of Mathematica, and then playing around with the page author's concepts? I can't, it's too mind blowing. Hopefully you will be able to visualize this leap forward better than me. --SatansLilHlpr Congrats, MathML people! I've been lurking on your newsgroup. I'm REALLY looking forward to displaying my Physics lectures natively with MATHML. No offense to Latex2HTML but equations as GIF's has got to go! The abiword work has been making great progress on many fronts but unfortunately has zero math support right now. When you're happy with MathML, do you think you could help those guys out too? Martin Sevior |
