Spot the difference
By fredw on Tuesday, August 3 2010, 23:18 - Permalink
Some screenshots to let you compare the rendering of Gecko with or without the recommended fonts installed and discover the improvements on which the Mozilla MathML Team is working...
| Version | Default Rendering | Rendering with recommended fonts |
|---|---|---|
| Release |  |
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| Future |  |
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Comments
For years, Microsoft Internet Explorer is able to suggest installing fonts package for cases where the users doesn't have the required fonts. We can do the same, and host some GPL'ed fonts over on addons.mozilla.org.
Yes, and for many years proposals have been made on Bugzilla to improve font installation. But as you may guess, it's one thing to have ideas and another thing to implement them. Note that an alternative proposal is to use the recent support for downloadable fonts. Anyway, for the moment, the Mozilla MathML Team is working on improving the support for fonts rather than the installation itself. The plan is available at https://wiki.mozilla.org/MathML:Fon...
What's wrong with http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/wo... ?
@Matěj: That's what I was talking about when I mentioned downloadable fonts. People have proposed either to ship fonts with the Firefox distribution or to provide them on a Mozilla server, and then use these fonts via a @font-face in the user agent stylesheet. In both cases, there are at least two potential issues, a legal one (license compatibility) and a technical one (download size e.g. STIX fonts have size 2.6MB). Moreover, purists may dislike this method because it is not a "clean" installation. The current point of view of the Mozilla MathML Team is rather to try to add support for as many fonts as possible to increase the chance that those available on the user environment would be sufficient to get a good rendering. In addition, we are adding a fallback using "scale" transforms, that you can see on the screenshots above.