Help talk:Displaying a formula/Archive 1

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Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

A new way to view formulas in browsers

Please, attention! If you are interesting to finish develop.

What is it a page?

– It is a page of project overview.

What is the project name?

– Formulas for us.

Who is an author of the project?

– Dmitry Zotov.

What is a purpose of the project?

– To develop a comfortable method for the visualization of different sort of formulas in the Internet browsers.

What stage is the project on?

– An effective solution was found and some features of other technologies used by him are tested.

What technologies is it possible to realize the prepared decision by?

– Java, JavaScript, MathML, CML, TeX, DOM, CSS, HTML, XML.

How does the decision provide for to use Java technology?

– As an applet. He demonstrates a formula.

If not to accent attention at internal work of applet, what information is he exchanged with other components of decision?

– He gets such information: size and color of font, character of background, style of reflections of formulas, language on which a formula and record of formula was written down in this language. He gives information about the sizes of the image of formula and displacement in relation to the baseline of line that he is inserted on.

What part in the decision does act by technology of JavaScript?

– She co-operates with technology of Java and Internet browser.

What concrete mechanisms can an exchange of information between the components of decision?

– The applet of Java can get information the call of the methods from JavaScript scenario, passing of parameters at an insertion in HTML, and by a local or remote file, the address of which can be passed of one of the first two methods. To return information he can by the object returned from a method. Passing to information of JavaScript to the Internet browser can take place by the known DOM technology.

How can there be a process of reflection of formula in the browser of the Internet?

– An user creates HTML document, containing the necessary JavaScript scenario. Inserts a necessary applet in this document. Adjusts him statically by parameters and additional files (including passes a line with the name of the language of record of formulas used by him and record of formula in this language). After, it is needed to start this document in the browser of the Internet. After the start, Java applet will reveal to JavaScript the scenario parameters of the dynamic tuning of insertion itself in a document, and JavaScript will execute this tuning by DOM/CSS. It will allow a formula correctly enough represented in a document. The JavaScript scenario can watch the changes of sizes and colors of font, character of background, scale and to retune a formula dynamically.

Will there be a project to develop farther?

– Yes.

What is it assumed to do in the near time?

– Trial page that evidently will show co-operation of technologies for the reflection of formulas in the browsers of the Internet.

Is there a reflection of formulas in the browsers of the Internet a problem?

– I ran into it. In the Internet also there is a lot of forums, where both this problem and possible decisions come into question. However, effective decision I did not find there. In one well-known Internet encyclopedia the pictures of formulas, created "on the fly, are used". However, their sizes and colors is impossible to change.

Is there a necessity in the use of browsers of the Internet for the reflection of formulas? Possibly, do the specialized programs befit for this purpose?

– Technologies, related to the Internet, have large distribution and formulas, represented on their base, do not require additional software. It befits for such genre of sites as scientific publications. In addition, Internet browsers are constantly perfected and, learning to work with them, users get comfortable access to the most various information. Including, before long, and to the comfortably represented formulas.

Are you going to do the variant of this idea prepared for the use with support of even one language or his subset?

– Possibly. However, as an acceptable enough decision is already found, I count on a help other people that can do its concrete realization.

Are there some stages developments that would require specific skills?

– Yes. One stage is related to the translation of record of formula in the working structure of formula. And other stage which is related to the correct reflection of this structure. However much it seems to me that the carefully thought out system of classes can considerably simplify motion of work. It is similarly needed to create the formats of styles of reflection of formulas (XML), those users could change on their taste.

Is it possible with you to associate for consultations, wishes, questions or additions?

– Yes. By e-mail. Address is sharp-witted@rambler.ru.

The above is out of context and references. Is it spam? I have an idea about a WP project on wikipedia based interactive calculation, plotting, animation and simulation. Is that what the above is about? I suggest that the section should be removed or archived. Mange01 14:51, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Where are more information about your idea? And what a date of implementation? To user Mange01. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.207.99.2 (talk) 15:22, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Why so large formulas?

Why is the default font size of the formulas much larger than the text? This is a problem especially in inline formulas. What can I do to overcome this problem? I have to choose a very large text size in my browser to make it harmonize with the formulas, but that should not be the way to go. I suggest that the default templates / .CSS files should be revised for smaller formula size. Mange01 15:03, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

On the other hand if the user wants to zoom in to a PNG formula — perhaps because they have poor eyesight and can't read some sub-subscripts — ...they cannot!

—DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 07:48, 5 December 2007 (UTC))

I set up a local wiki server with texvc, and I really want to have an option to change the default settings. Can I? Thanks. --Lanyijie 09:16, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: Wiki based interactive math

I have a vision of a wiki project on interactive web based math. From wikipedia articles, the user should find interactive free tools for web based calculation, visulization, simulation, modelling and symbolic math. A commercial software such as Maple, Matlab and MathCAD should not be required for running computer simulations.

Where is the appropriate place to discuss this? Viewpoints on the basic idea?

Application examples that I have in mind:

Web based unit conversion: When reading an article about for example Celcius, the user should be able to access a tool where he can enter a temperature in a field or using a slide control, and convert it between Fahrenheit, Kelvin, Celcius and Rankine.
Web based formula calculation: When reading any wikipedia article about a math formula, the user should be able to enter numerical values of the parameters and get numerical results. Sometimes a certain interactive tool page may be designed for the formula, where controls such as text boxes, radio buttons, slide bars, etc, can be found. There should also be a generic way to calculate any formula found in wikipedia, for example by accessing a tool from the background menu, or by copying the formula into some kind of mathematical sandbox or private notebook web page.
Web based interactive plots: In plots, the user should be able to elaborate with different parameter values and generate new plots.
Web based animation: Models of dynamic processes may be visualized by means of plots with an aditional time dimension, i.e. by animations. Examples are math formulas with a time dimension, but also electrical circuits, physical phenomena, etc. The animations may resemble Flash animations, and be two or three dimensional.
Web based stochastic simulation: It should be possible to visualize the behaviour of models of stochastic processes, for example queuing theory applications such as computer networks, that change their behaviour on a time-to-time scale.
Web based algorithm simulation: It should be possible to run algorithms documentet by flow charts, signal flow charts, or mathematical style pseudo code, in view to test it for certain values, and to visualize the behaviour.
Web-based component-based graphical programming and modelling: Users should be able to build complex system models by linking and interconnecting various wiki objects, for example math formulas, algorithms, scripts, lock-up tables, software components, electrical circuit models, plots, and interactive controls into their own wiki documents. Each entity may be graphically represented by a block in a flow chart, state-flow diagram, signal/data flow diagram, UML diagram, etc, and the user may copy and paste such blocks between models. AJAX style web service for web based graphical editing may be an option. In some cases, a commercial tool may be required to design a block, but not to utilize it in a model. The model may be published on a wiki server, publically or on a private note page. It may also be saved and run locally using some freeware software. This idea resembles the old mathCad/MathConnex commercial software, where OLE linking and embedding was used to interconnect various math blocks, for example mathcad formulas and pseudo code scripts, matlab functions, Excel scheats, spice models of electrial circuits, etc.
Web based simulation of dynamic systems. Similar to Simulink models.
Web based symbolic math: The user should be able to elaborate algebraically with formulas in for example wikipedia. See for example MathCAD.
Web based audio and video processing: The user should be able to apply various algorithms on his own recorded sound, video and documents.

The calculations should normally be carried out at the client side, to relieve the wiki web server from load. However, in some cases it might be interesting that the server generates a "cashed" version of a plot or an animation, for some common parameter cases.

In computer simulation, distributed computing is important, and sometimes we want to distribute the model over different machines. Different blocks and/oror different parameter cases, may be simulated on different machines. The distributed computing may be carried out by a local computer cluster, or by a worldwide peer-to-peer network of users sharing each others capacity. A web based user interface for controlling the distributed computing is also a vision.

To achieve efficient computer simulation, there should be means of controlling cashing, look-up tables, etc. Only changed values should be recalculated, as in a spread-sheet document or in MathCAD.

Recommend \displaystyle instead of \,?

Wouldn‘t it be easier to recommend \displaystyle if one wanted a formula to be rendered as png? The word has a meaning that is easy to remember, easier than the \, trick with a comment. Or don’t they have the same effect? H. (talk) 11:41, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Add useful links

Please add
Wikipedia:How_to_write_a_Wikipedia_article_on_Mathematics#Typesetting_of_mathematical_formulas
Wikipedia:Mathematical_symbols
as "See also" links to this article. Just an easy guide for those looking for help without crawling through paragraphs of stuff. Brews ohare (talk) 19:45, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Non-italic text

The guide suggests either \mathrm{·} or \mbox{·} for rendering "text" non-italic (i.e. 'roman'). There are three serious problems:

\mathrm{·} will not operate on e.g. Greek letters!

compare

\,\!\theta

and

\,\!\mathrm {\theta }

(expected θ and θ)

nowhere is it made clear that \mbox{·} is simply a way of including 'verbatim' text, so that tokens signifying e.g. Greek letters (say, \theta) will not be parsed correctly (or in fact at all — wierd!!)

compare

\,\!\mathrm {\theta }

and Failed to parse (syntax error): {\displaystyle \,\!\mbox{\theta}}

(expected θ for both)

generally \mathrm{·} is preferable for rendering text like "max" as a subscript, because \mbox{·} doesn't shrink the text ...it displays the argument exactly as entered:

compare

\,\!t_{\mathrm {max} }

and

\,\!t_{\mbox{max}}

(expected t_max for both)

Given this it seems \mathrm{·} should always be preferred to \mbox{·}!?

—DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 08:01, 5 December 2007 (UTC)) Amended —DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 08:04, 5 December 2007 (UTC))

Italic variables

It is not apparent how to force uppercase Greek letters to render in italics. For example:

compare

\,\!\Gamma

and

\,\!\mathrm {\Gamma }

(expected Γ and Γ)

Note: a good reference for italicising formulæ is:
I. M. MILLS and W. V. METANOMSKI; On the use of italic and roman fonts for symbols in scientific text; IUPAC Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols; December 1999. (Accessed from http://www.iupac.org/standing/idcns/italic-roman_dec99.pdf, 2003–05–08.)

—DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 08:10, 5 December 2007 (UTC))

Hmm, no one seems to come here very often. If your still after an answer try <math>\,\!\mathit{\Gamma}</math> which will give you this;

\,\!{\mathit {\Gamma }}

. SpinningSpark 18:52, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Adding symbols to TeX

How does one go about adding symbols or commands to TeX? For instance, there is a section here in "Displaying a formula" for "Unsorted new stuff". How does one create "new stuff"——If it has to be approved, where does one submit it? ~Kaimbridge~00:19, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Numbered Equations?

Is there a way to number automatically equations in Wikipedia? Thanks--Geremia (talk) 06:41, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Font used

Hi all, I have been curious about exactly which font is rendered into these pngs? I have acquired the font, "cmr10": Computer Modern Roman font, but it doesn't seem to match up. Any idea what the actual font is? Or better yet, link to a ttf? ॐ नमःशिवाय _{Śaiva Sujīt} सुजीत ॐ 08:05, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi, you already tried cmmi*? Computer Modern Math Italic? --Georg-Johann (talk) 14:42, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Omicrons are missing from Greek alphabet

/omicron and /Omicron are not recognised. Why? Is this a bug? SpinningSpark 18:54, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

That's probably because Greek 'omicron', both lower and uppercase, are identical glyphs to Latin 'o'. See the Short Math Guide for LaTeX ftp://ftp.ams.org/pub/tex/doc/amsmath/short-math-guide.pdf par.3.4 page 5. --CiaPan (talk) 05:59, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Hence

I was wondering if there a tag for a mathematical "therefore"? (I.e. the equivalent to the HTML "∴" tag: ∴) I didn't see it documented.—RJH (talk) 19:33, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

It is just \therefore,

\therefore

. JackSchmidt (talk) 19:39, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Math tags as a link

I have Mediawiki installed. I want to display \gamma with a mouseover text description of :gamma. It fails and the culprit is "|" . Is there a solution to this? I don't want to manually update the page ( one of many under wikipedia dump). Please let me know if i am missing a mathml package. Thanks

[[gamma|<math>\gamma</math>]] - doesn't work but i want this to work as is. any thoughts?

[[<math>\gamma</math>]] - works fine — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2008-05-13T21:56:24Z (talk • contribs) 131.107.0.73

On my mediawiki installation with texvc installed, it works just fine. On wikipedia it works just fine. If you need help with mediawiki software, you probably want to check out mw:Project:Help, or more specifically mw:Manual:Math for the texvc help. JackSchmidt (talk) 22:08, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

TeX Reference Card - Restricted Access

There is a reference on the bottom of the page for a reference card of TeX, offered under the URL "http://www.csit.fsu.edu/docs/tex/tex-refcard-letter.pdf". I can't get to the page because it says I do not have permission to. I'm not sure if the port is blocked by my personal firewall, or it the file has been restricted of public access. I hesitate to change the link to the Internet Archive link here because of this doubt. Is anybody having the same restricted access problem? Un Piton (talk) 14:52, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I got it too. The error is coming from the server so I don't think it would be a personal firewall problem. SpinningSpark 20:50, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Changing font size in Wikipedia

Hi! I noticed that Wikipedia isn't able to change font size in latex. For example code \tiny \frac{355}{113} results an error message, not tinier font size. And when I tried my code in a latex generator it produces just fine tinier font size. Is there any reason why changing font size is not allowed in Wikipedia? --QWerk (talk) 10:34, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Only a small part of LaTeX is implemented on Wikipedia - just enough for the purposes of doing formulae. But for the example you quote \tfrac{355}{113} should work and renders as;

{\tfrac {355}{113}}

as opposed to

{\frac {355}{113}}

for \frac{355}{113}

SpinningSpark 11:51, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

OK. Thanks for the advice. --QWerk (talk) 12:15, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

If you think that there is a need for a new feature you can always try suggesting it at Wikimedia Bugzilla. Usually only goes anywhere though if there is lots of people supporting it so discussing first at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) would be a good idea. SpinningSpark 12:38, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Dollar sign mania

The page says to most users

 ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
 ┃                                   │                                        │          How it looks rendered           ┃
 ┃              Feature              │                 Syntax                 ├───────────────────┬──────────────────────┨
 ┃                                   │                                        │       HTML        │         PNG          ┃
 ┠───────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────────┨
 ┃ Superscript                       │ a^2                                    │ a^2               │ a^2 \,\!             ┃
 ┠───────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────────┨
 ┃ Subscript                         │ a_2                                    │ a[2]              │ a_2 \,\!             ┃
 ┠───────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────────┨

But if you have a certain preference set this is what you will see

 ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
 ┃                                  │                                       │           How it looks rendered            ┃
 ┃             Feature              │                Syntax                 ├────────────────────┬───────────────────────┨
 ┃                                  │                                       │        HTML        │          PNG          ┃
 ┠──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────┼───────────────────────┨
 ┃ Superscript                      │ a^2                                   │ $ a^2 $            │ $ a^2 \,\! $          ┃
 ┠──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────┼───────────────────────┨
 ┃ Subscript                        │ a_2                                   │ $ a_2 $            │ $ a_2 \,\! $          ┃
 ┠──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────┼───────────────────────┨

As the page is supposed to be showing what different users see, it itself should be a static and not appear different to different users! And those $'s look horrible at least in my text browser. You at least need an extra column to show what "dollar sign victims" see if you don't intend to fix it. Jidanni (talk) 02:40, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Physics?

For physics, I would like to be able to write

bold italic latin symbols,
bold italic capital Greek symbols, and
bold roman small Greek symbols.

How to do it in Wikimath? Miraceti (talk) 17:29, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Is MathML ever going to happen?

Really, these renderings in png are terribly fugly! With FF3's release, there is no excuse why the feature should not be made a top priority by the wikimedia devs. --Dragon695 (talk) 20:14, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I really hope MathML does happen, there is a lot of bugs and errors when you try to do complex function like sigma notation, limits...etc and the characters is somewhat ugly and the fractions is making the entire formula look horrible, in fact it almost deteroriate the entire look of the formula because the fraction is humongously big. Wish some developers can make MathType a lightweight web open source markup. --Ramu50 (talk) 21:02, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

latex vs. html

The template doesn't exist anymore there, does it? LivingShadow (talk) 10:58, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

TeX will display in HTML by default, and only in PNG if the equation is sufficiently complex. Gary King (talk) 19:56, 26 October 2008 (UTC)