Re: [WWdevel] jsMath v2.0 and WeBWorK

[Arnold P. <ap...@ma...>]

At 06:25 PM 8/15/2005, Davide P.Cervone wrote:

Hi Davide,

The fonts look nice.  You may or may not care, but there are some 
problems viewing things on MSIE 6 (at least on my PC at 
home).  Basically it looks like horizontal lines don't display 
correctly. E.g. in
http://omega.math.union.edu/webwork2/05SP-MTH015-01/Week9/1/
the horizontal line in the fraction doesn't appear and the numerator 
appears to the right of the denominator.

In
http://omega.math.union.edu/webwork2/05SP-MTH015-01/Week9/10/
the horizontal line in the radical sign doesn't appear.

In
http://omega.math.union.edu/webwork2/05SP-MTH015-01/Week6/4/
the bar over the v does appear, but it appears above and to the right 
of the v, not directly over it.

In
http://omega.math.union.edu/webwork2/05SP-MTH015-01/Week6/6/
instead of v bar, I see a v with a dot above and to the right of the v, etc.

Arnie


>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
>
>
>
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Prof. Arnold K. Pizer
Dept. of Mathematics
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
(585) 275-7767