Writing math symbols

Writing math symbols

Hi all,

I think it would be worth all having a look at the Wikipedia Mathematics Manual of Style page which talks about rendering math on wiki pages. The core idea is that since the latex rendering isn't always very pretty when used inline, the wiki community usually switches to some html rendition as often as possible there and keeps the latex itself to display more complicated expression on separate lines. For example, see the following two choices of rendition.

Example only using <math> tags

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Consider the system of linear equations where is a -matrix. Then what is the meaning of if any? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

compared to

Example using some html rendering

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Consider the system of linear equations Ax = b where A is a (n x m)-matrix. Then what is the meaning of

if any? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

I'm perfectly well aware that there is something a little broken with the idea of rendering some of the text in html and some of it in latex using the <math> tags, but the real question is how do we want to display the information we are providing. Having had a look at what we produced so far, most of the time it works great, but I think here and there there are improvements that could be made and since the wikipedia community has already agreed on some standards, we might as well just use them ourselves.

Thoughts, ideas, comments?

David Kohler17:50, 6 March 2012

Hello David,

Truly, I really don't know which way is best. To be honest, I think at this point this point is relatively minor - getting the information on there first should be top priority - then eventually if people are choosy enough, we can go back and make the few minor adjustments. It will feel like we're doing work twice - but quite honestly, editing solved problems is much faster than solving them I think.

Thats my $0.02.

CarmenBruni04:42, 18 March 2012

It is a fairly minor point I totally agree!

David Kohler00:00, 19 March 2012
 

I think if we use both the HTML rendering and the <math> tags, we should format the font of the HTML rendering to a sans-serif font. I know LaTeX uses the Computer Modern font, which would be of course ideal. But to make that work well we would have to implement custom markup/tags.

Alfred Xing (talk)02:22, 6 October 2012

Hi Alfred,

It is a good point, but I'm not sure we can get access to that kind of modifications. The wiki is used by the entire UBC community. If you look at the math pages on wikipedia, they end up doing something similar to what we try here. In the end it is not perfect, but works well enough.

One annoying issue are double derivatives... the ' ' has the wiki believe it should be italics. And besides ugly things such as using a nowiki tag, there isn't much we can do except going in math mode.

David Kohler (talk)18:14, 6 October 2012

Maybe we can try using double quotation marks for the inline text (although you have to add a space between the f and the " )? The two apostrophes work with the <math> tags.

Examples:

Inline f "(x).

Alfred Xing (talk)18:59, 6 October 2012