Re: Gecko bugs blocking use of Native MathML in MathJax

On 03/12/2012 22:33, Peter Krautzberger wrote:
> Regarding 1) font support.
>
> Some thoughts.
>
> * Using the MathJax CDN is ok for now, though a dedicated folder on 
> the CDN might make more sense to simplify the link structure (and give 
> us some metrics).
> * I would also consider uploading the fonts to Google's webfonts if 
> that's interesting. I still don't know if there are any ramifications 
> (special licensing etc), so if anybody has insight, let me know.
> * I'm wondering if Firefox could somehow ship with the STIX fonts (or 
> MathJax fonts). The CDN would still make sense as a fallback, but this 
> seems more natural to just ship them. What are the technical, or legal 
> difficulties with this?
>
> Peter.
I'm not sure I was clear but when I was talking about using fonts from 
MathJax's CDN, I really meant "make MathJax's Native MathML Output use 
the fonts from the MathJax's CDN". That's already partially the case: 
MathJax inserts @font-face rules pointing to MathJax's fonts (e.g. 
fraktur or calligraphic) in order to workaround issues with mathvariant 
in Gecko. The idea is just to generalize that to make these fonts used 
to stretch operators too. Allowing people to use @font-face rule 
pointing to MathJax's CDN when Gecko's Native MathML is directly used in 
pages is a different issue, I was really only considering here the case 
when it is used via MathJax.

Personally, I think that making each application handle its own copy of 
fonts, static libraries etc is bad software engineering practice. 
Ideally, applications on a same operating system should try to share 
resources as much as possible and let package management system handle 
dependencies, versions etc Recent versions of Mac/iOS have STIX fonts, 
recent versions of Windows have Cambria Math (that Gecko doesn't support 
yet) and most Linux distributions may add dependencies to STIX fonts. I 
believe FirefoxOS will ship with math fonts and I reported a bug to 
Android that hopefully will result in STIX being integrated. So the idea 
is to support as much font as possible and to use those available on the 
system. One of the main goal is to support Open Type Math fonts. Again, 
I didn't include this bug as I was considering what is necessary when 
Gecko's Native MathML is used in MathJax.

-- 
Frédéric Wang
maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic