[GTALUG] MathML Support on the Internet

[Stewart Russell]

Hi Howard - I got your http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson/MathML.html page looking
roughly how one might want it in Firefox. Note that this Firefox Quantum (
≥ v.57): all bets are off for older versions that use a different engine.

First off, the maths fonts on your system are probably crap. TeX Gyre will
do in a pinch, but STIX is prettier. They're in the fonts-stix package.

Secondly, Firefox considers mathematics a separate language. Consequently,
it has font size controls all its own. Mathematics is traditionally
typeset *very
slightly* smaller than the body text font, and with web typography's usual
lack of flair, Firefox sets them smaller still. Go into *Preferences*
→ *Language
and Appearance* → *Fonts and Colours*, then hit *Advanced …*. After that,
choose *Mathematics* in the *Fonts for* dropdown, and pick STIX a size or
two larger than your standard font.

☛ If there's one useful setting you take from this page, set your *Minimum
font size* to something less dismal than the tiny default. Your eyes will
thank you.

I've been using MathML happily since about 2002. I wasn't aware of
rendering problems. If Chrome chooses not to support an effectively ancient
and widespread standard, bad cess to 'em and I discard them.

If you're auto-converting from TeX, try to do it as high up the conversion
chain as you can. By the time your doco has hit DVI, it's basically marks
on paper and any semantic information is lost. I don't think I've used DVI
files this century: I was an early adopter of pdftex, and I'm pretty sure
my TeX engine of choice these days is pdfxetex: straight to PDF, while also
supporting bidirectional fonts, OpenType variant glyph forms and (IIRC)
micro-justification of hyphenated pages. This little wrinkle pushes hyphens
slightly into the right margin. It looks much better. Also, since every
printing system I'm ever likely to use has a PDF document path (PostScript
is dead), it cuts out a lot of conversion and font hassle. PDF's just super
handy to have as a virtual paper format anyway. Dunno what I did before
CUPS, IPP and the cups-pdf virtual printer. Waste lots of paper, I suppose.

cheers,
 Stewart
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