[WWdevel] jsMath v2.0 and WeBWorK

[Davide P.C. <dp...@un...>]

Folks:

I have recently released version 2.0 of jsMath, which includes a number 
of important new features.  The most apparent of these are:

1.  A new fallback method for when the TeX fonts are not installed on 
the user's computer.  It now uses images of the individual characters 
rather than unicode characters to display the mathematics.  This is 
more reliable, in general, and produced better results, though there 
are issues about printing and the mathematical notation can't be 
colored as it could be with the TeX fonts and unicode fonts.

2.  There is now a control panel for jsMath that lets the user adjust 
the settings for jsMath, including which fallback method to use, and 
the relative size of the mathematics compared to the surrounding text.  
The panel can be opened by pressing a small floating button at the 
lower right-hand side of the screen or by ALT-clicking on any 
mathematical expression.

3.  The font warning message now only appears on the first page 
containing jsMath during your browser session.  (The control panel can 
be used to turn off these messages for longer periods of time.)

4.  Better support for Konqueror under unix, and Safari under OS X 10.4.

There are lots of internal improvements, better documentation, and more 
customization possibilities, but these will not impact jsMath 
particularly.

Before I make the changes to the CVS repository, I wanted to ask the WW 
development community's advice.  The new image-font fallback method 
uses a lot of small image files (6 fonts at 13 sizes in two different 
formats yielding some 20000 separate images).  I don't want to add that 
many individual files to the cvs repository, as these are not going to 
be changing, and there is no need to keep CVS data on them all, or have 
to scan them during updates, etc.  The alternative is to make an 
archive from them and put that in the CVS repository.  Unpacking it 
would be another step in the WW installation.  Failure to do this would 
cause jsMath's fallback method to fail miserably.  There is a setting 
that can be made to prevent jsMath from using the images (in case 
someone doesn't want to install the images), and it will use the 
current unicode version instead, though the image mode is much better.

So, it an extra installation step acceptable?  Should the non-image 
mode be enabled by default, so that if they don't unpack the fonts, it 
still works?

Also, the image fallback method is good enough that it might be 
reasonable not to put up the missing font message at all.  (There is a 
setting in global.conf that disables it.)  Users can still get to the 
download site from a link on the control panel.  Should the message be 
disabled entirely?

For those of you interested in seeing the new version of jsMath, I have 
installed it on our server at Union, and you can try it out there.  Go 
to
http://omega.math.union.edu/ and select the Math 15 course, logging in 
as guest.  We will be putting up new courses for the fall term shortly, 
so you may need to go to the "past courses" link to find something with 
any non-trivial assignments in it.  Note that jsMath is not the default 
mode, so you will have to change to it.  Use the control panel at the 
lower right to change the selected display mode if you want to try out 
the different image/unicode methods.  Note, however, that jsMath will 
reload the page when you change one of the settings, so you might get a 
alert box asking if that is acceptable.

Let me know how you think the images should be handled in the CVS 
repository.

Davide