Toby Bartels is a troll and I'm not going to listen
any more to what he
says.
But he may have some valid criticisms that could only make texvc better.
Although he seems to be a bit fundamentalist about what texvc should allow
in his comments on the TeX testing pages; e.g., "...we really don't need TeX
support inline, it should probably not be supported inline. ... Wikipedia's
math should stick to English letters in boldface and italic whenever
possible, for the widest readability, with exceptions only for things (like
[pi]) that are universally rendered in other fonts."
Aside from that, my own observations are this:
1) Fonts seem to be over anti-aliased. '+', '-', and '=' signs
are all
blury, when they should be distinct, straight lines.
2) Fonts seem to be over weighted, i.e., everything looks somewhat bold.
3) Inline math doesn't feel very readable. PlanetMath's inline equations
feel a bit more readable than texvc's.
Of course, these are rather non-technical criticisms of texvc's font
rendering. I'd suggest employing whatever font rendering defaults that
PlanetMath is using, as their equations feel much more readable and much
less ugly.
Also, what about <math> ... </math> conflicting with MathML? If people
employ MathML in an article, does texvc check between the <math> ... </math>
tags to see whether it's MathML or TeX? Instead of overloading standard
tags, maybe it should be <tex> ... </tex>, and then just let people know
that Wikipedia only supports a subset of TeX for math purposes only. In any
case, that would make parsing of pages faster, as the "Is this MathML or
TeX?" logic could be thrown out. The price of that logic may be trivial
now, but what about when Wikipedia is serving hundreds of thousands of pages
a day? Plus it would make all the texvc input forward-compatible if it's
decided someday that fuller TeX support is needed and that <tex> ... </tex>
tags should be used.
Just my thoughts...
Okay, I'm done now,
Derek
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