# Blog de Frédéric

## Tag - latexml

Wednesday, January 29 2014

## New MathML Firefox add-ons on AMO

While the patches for MathML integration in MediaWiki are progressively being reviewed and merged and while we are working on the support for Open Type fonts with a MATH table in Gecko, I finally found time to check the progress in Mozilla's add-on SDK. In particular, since the last time I tried (some years ago) they have introduced a cleaner interface for content scripts as well as the possibility to use XPCOM for missing features. Hence I have been able to update some of my experimental MathML add-ons. I have submitted two new add-ons to Mozilla's AMO that I hope could be useful to some people:

• MathJax Native MathML, an add-on to force MathJax to switch to Gecko's MathML support without having to use the MathJax menu to change the output mode and works even on Websites where that menu is disabled. This also removes MathJax's automatic rescaling and inline-block span that are currently causing random rendering bugs with Gecko's native MathML (and will confuse possible future line-breaking support anyway).
• MathML Copy (at the moment only partially reviewed by the AMO team), an add-on to copy MathML and TeX into the clipboard. For MathML, two flavors are copied: the source as plain text (to paste in your favorite text editor) and the MathML as HTML (to paste in Thunderbird, MDN, any Gecko-based HTML editor etc). Copying TeX is only possible when it is provided via the standard MathML annotation method, which is the case in e.g. LaTeXML and Instiki documents as well as in Wikipedia in the future.

As usual, there is room for improvements and bug fixes, but that's a start. In particular I would be happy to get translations for the two strings of the MathML Copy add-on: "Copy MathML Formula" and "Copy TeX Source". Also, because I used the add-on SDK these add-ons are unfortunately only available for Firefox at the moment...

Thursday, September 13 2012

## Master Thesis, LaTeXML and Quantum Groups (part 1)

I wanted to wait for my oral defense before blogging about my master thesis and how I manage to publish Web and paper versions of it. However, I finally met my supervisor today and the oral defense is only likely to take place next Wednesday. I do not want to delay too much this blog post and thus decided to publish it today...

This year, I have taken the following approach to write my master thesis: from LaTeX input files, I used XeLaTeX to generate a pdf document and LaTeXML to generate HTML+MathML Web pages. I had to handle some small differences via separate configuration files. However in general, these two tools are compatible and accept more or less the same LaTeX input. I did not really have to make graphics: I only used the amscd package to draw simple commutative diagrams and did not try to draw schemas for representations of quantum groups. Hence I did not get the opportunity to test how LaTeXML can generate MathML inside SVG, although I saw on July something interesting for Firefox on the LaTeXML mailing list.

The pdf version provides a good print layout which allows to workaround some issues that I had two years ago when I printed my Master Thesis in Computer Science directly from Firefox. XeLaTeX also seems much faster and so more convenient to use when you only want to check that your LaTeX code is syntactically correct and get a quick preview. It seems that XeLaTeX uses a kind of cache: there are intermediary files that I guess are used again when you regenerate the document. In contrast, LaTeXML seems to always regenerate one big XML file in a first step and the Web pages in a second step. Perhaps LaTeXML has an option to avoid that behavior or perhaps the idea of a cache system does not work well in the case of Web pages.

The output of LaTeXML has the classical advantages of HTML+MathML for publication on the Web and is much more comfortable to read on a screen. Generally speaking, I think Firefox renders pretty well the LaTeXML output. LaTeXML generates HTML rows to implement labelling and does not rely on mathvariant, which allow to avoid issues with <mlabeledtr> and token elements. However, I still note some MathML's rendering imperfections which, not surprisingly, have already be mentioned in the MathML project roadmap:

• Linebreaking: bad line breaks inside some equations, apparently those generated by some environments like multline or gathered. Sometimes, I also see bad line breaks around equations for example when they are inside parenthesis.
• Spacing: the lack of support for mtable@rowspacing/columnspacing seems to give wrong spacing inside binom-like notations. For some reason LaTeXML generates <mpadded> elements of zero width in some places and they cause weird overlappings in some summations.
• Operator Stretching: commutative diagrams in the definition of Hopf algebras would look better if we support stretching operators in table cells.

This also gives me the opportunity to report various bugs and give some suggestions to the LaTeXML team, including the use of MathJax (for browsers without MathML support), the replacement of <mfenced> by the equivalent <mrow>, <mo> constructions (better rendering in Firefox), improvement to the generation of headers in HTML5 and more.

The title of my master thesis is "Specialization of Quantum Groups at a Root of Unity and Finite Dimensional Representations". The concept of Quantum Groups is based on ideas from theoretical physics, but I studied these structures from a purely algebraic point of view. That is not likely to be interesting if you have never heard about Lie algebras or are not familiar with representation theory, so I will present my contribution in a separate blog post.