[ww-users] MathJax in WorkingWiki

[Lee W. <wor...@gm...>]

Dear watchful WorkingWiki warriors,

I want to warn you of a change in the software.

We've been using MathJax [www.mathjax.org] to display the math on our 
wikis at McMaster for a while, and it seems to be working well enough 
that I want to go ahead and make it the default behavior.  This will 
give us good-looking scaleable math on a wide variety of browsers, as 
opposed to the current setup, which basically gives you nice scalable 
math on Firefox if you download the right math fonts and ask for it in 
the wiki preferences, and gives you bitmap images of the math otherwise.

If you do happen to use Firefox and have the math fonts, because using 
that is faster than MathJax, you'll still get that behavior instead of 
MathJax if you select the "use MathML" preference item on the wiki.

This change takes effect in revision 837 of WorkingWiki.  If you're 
already using the WW MathJax feature (by explicitly enabling it on your 
wikis) you're fine already and you can ignore this, unless you want the 
part where the preferences item turns off MathJax.  If you're using WW 
tarfiles instead of subversion and you want the new code, let me know.

Any concerns or questions, please let me know.

Lee

P.S. Note that this whole business is completely independent of any 
other MW extensions including the Math extension and the MathJax 
extension, which can be confusing.

P.S.2. There is one exception to that, which is that if you use the Math 
extension's preference item to request MathML, WorkingWiki respects your 
choice, so that we can avoid having redundant questions on the 
preferences page.  In MediaWiki 1.18 or later, there's a WW-specific 
preferences item, because you don't necessarily have the Math extension. 
  If you are opting to use the Math extension anyway, WW's preference 
item is redundant and you can make it go away by setting 
$wwProvideMathmlPreference = false.