Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Reduce math rendering preferences 2

From my perhaps idiosyncratic point of view, the most obvious issues are these:

• "Displayed", as opposed to "inline" TeX looks very good in Wikipedia articles, but "inline" TeX usually looks about three or four times as big as the surrounding text, and that looks buffoonish.
• In "inline" TeX, simple things like a^b and a_b are formatted wrong: obviously in both cases the a should be at the same level as the surrounding text and the b respectively higher or lower.
• Making everyone use mathJax may be the solution, but mathJax still has bugs. Wikipedia needs more sophisticated behavior from mathJax than do other forums that use it, such as stackexchange and mathoverflow. For problems with the behavior of mathJax within Wikipedia, see this URL.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

This page may also shed some light (although much of what it deals with concerns quite different matters).

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

I find myself worrying that things like $a^b$ (<math>a^b</math>), which currently look just fine, will be turned into things like $a^b\,$ (<math>a^b\,</math>), which don't. It's simple formulas like these that get used most often outside of math articles, and while they look fine in HTML, they look terrible as PNGs because their baselines are wrong. E.g., in en:Chemistry we find, "The speed of a chemical reaction (at given temperature T) is related to the activation energy E, by the Boltzmann's population factor $e^{-E/kT}$", which doesn't look great but isn't awful. If we force PNG rendering then we get, "The speed of a chemical reaction (at given temperature T) is related to the activation energy E, by the Boltzmann's population factor $e^{-E/kT}\,$", which is atrocious. If not for baseline problems, I would support removing HTML rendering, but as it is I'm conflicted.

However, I would support reducing the number of possibilities down to three: TeX only, PNG only, and a single HTML option. There's no reason to have so many different HTML options. This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Ozob.

If not for baseline problems, I would support removing HTML rendering, but as it is I'm conflicted.

I agree.

HelderOzob, you say $a^b$ looks fine, but that actually depends on how the user's preferences are set. I recently went through the steps whose details I prefer not to remember just now (it involved creating a special file....) that caused me to see everything as mathJax makes it appear, so that now both $a^b$ and $a^b\,$ look good when I view them on Wikipedia, but the latter doesn't look good when I view it here.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Michael Hardy.

Actually, it was Ozob who said that =)

And in fact the result depends on the user preferences (for me both formulas are identical since I'm using "Always render PNG" at the moment), so I've added the wikicode on the side of his formulas to help other readers to understand what he said above.

Thank you, it's clearer with the wikicode next to it.

This post was posted by He7d3r, but signed as Ozob.

The other problem with $a^b\,$ (<math>a^b\,</math>), is the font sizes, if the base font size in the math png could be made to match the surrounding text, that would fix the other major rendering problem with current png rendering. It would also fix a problem with creating wikibooks which use a different fontsize.

Another issues with the current solution is the font choice and style. png rendering uses an italic serif font. The inline versions without math tags are typically san-serif which may or may not be italic, a^b (a<sup>b</sup>), or a^b (''a''<sup>b</sup>), or a^b (''a''<sup>''b''</sup>). Many users prefer this as the current inline png rendering looks so bad. This creates a very inconsistent typography as multiple techniques are used in the same article.

There have been some workaround solutions to the inline math problem w:Template:Math uses CSS styles so some effect, but use of this template is somewhat contentious and only favoured by a few editors. There actually a whole bunch of templates w:Category:Mathematical formatting templates which are partial solutions to math rendering deficiencies.

My biggest problem with PNG is that it looks bad at high zoom levels, which affects people with bad eyesight, people who just like big text, and the increasing number of people with high resolution screens. Having said that, I recognize that the other choices have problems too, so seems to me like we need to keep at least some of the preferences around, at least for the near future. Kingdon 00:59, 26 July 2011 (UTC)