687809 - (mathml-in-mathjax) [meta] MathML in MathJax

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: MathML, defect)

Description

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

MathJax is a popular Javascript library to display mathematical formulas in any browser. For Firefox, the native MathML rendering is used. MathJax is also able to convert LaTeX to MathML. However, our MathML support has some issues that prevent the markup generated by MathJax to render correctly. This makes some people switch to MathJax's layout engine and it's a shame.

This is a tracking bug for issues that have been reported by MathJax folks. It looks like more and more people are using MathML throughout this library and so it seems important to fix these bugs.

Comment 1

[[Baboo]]

Printing issues reproducible using MathJax too?

Comment 2

[[Baboo]]

MathJax using MathML-based rendering that is.

Comment 3

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

MathJax also has its own Open Type fonts, which look closer to LaTeX fonts and thus are often preferred by MathJax users. That may be interesting to see if we can support them. They do not seem to contain an OpenType MATH table, though.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Adding bug 468568.
See MathJax issue tracker:
https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/13

Comment 5

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to Frédéric Wang from comment #4)
> Adding bug 468568.
> See MathJax issue tracker:
> https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/13

Sorry it is https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/172

Comment 6

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to [Baboo] from comment #1)
> Printing issues reproducible using MathJax too?

I've added dependencies to bug 697053 and bug 468568.

Comment 8

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Another bug due to bad width computation (testcase to reduce):
https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/88

Comment 9

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Things to do for MathJax fonts:
- horizontal braces (see bug 701758 comment 2)
- add rules in mathml.css (see bug 701758 comment 13)
- allow use of downloadable fonts (see bug 701758 comment 17)

Comment 10

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

MathJax has three commands \mathtip, \texttip and \toggle that generate maction elements: http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/unpacked/extensions/TeX/action.js

Comment 11

[elim.qiu]

I noticed that Firefox on snow leopard is extremely slow with MathJax content.

Please open this page http://math.elinkage.net/showthread.php?tid=102&pid=670#pid670 with various browsers.

Stop and reload is helps but it's just strange why the page cannot load in the first request

Comment 12

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to elim.qiu from comment #11)
> I noticed that Firefox on snow leopard is extremely slow with MathJax
> content.
> 
> Please open this page
> http://math.elinkage.net/showthread.php?tid=102&pid=670#pid670 with various
> browsers.
> 
> Stop and reload is helps but it's just strange why the page cannot load in
> the first request

This bug is to track MathML issues related to MathJax. Apparently, the page you refer to seems to use MathJax's HTML-CSS rendering so your problem would better be handled on the MathJax side or, if one can determine a precise reason of slowness in Firefox, as a dependency of bug 745687.

Anyway, MathJax's rendering engine is entirely written in Javascript and that's why it is so slow compared to the native rendering of browsers, especially for pages that contain a lot of formulas. Maybe MathJax's code can still be optimized (improvements have been made in version 2.0, but the page you mention still uses version 1.1) and Javascript execution in browsers can be made faster. But this will never be as efficient as Gecko's native rendering. So your problem will really be fixed by making MathJax use Firefox's MathML by default again, which is now the main goal of the present bug entry.

Other possible reasons:
- download time of Web fonts: to fix that, you can install local version of MathJax/STIX fonts on your system.
- LaTeX parsing: could be made faster if done before serving the page.

BTW, for those following this bug, Wikipedia now has an experimental MathJax option:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.mathml/browse_frm/thread/0ec9c3ccaee4964c#

Comment 13

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Mass WONTFIX for bugs related to legacy features that are not part of MathML Core (and with no plan to add them) or corresponding meta bugs. Please see bug 1495813 for the new meta bug.