Bug 114565 – [GTK] MathML unusable

• Component: WebKitGTK
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[ManDay]

webkit-gtk-1.10.2, MathML is unusable for must users.

[ManDay]

Created attachment 197944 [details]
screen

[Martin Robinson]

Do you have the styx fonts installed?

[ManDay]

No.

[Martin Robinson]

Can you install them and see if the rendering improves. MathML really demands a high-quality math font. Firefox has a nice prompt to install the fonts, but for WebKitGTK+ we may just rely on package manager suggestions.

[ManDay]

> MathML really demands a high-quality math font.

Which I must already have, given that I had no problem with MathML in previous Webkit-versions.

However, I'll of course try whether this helps. Could you give me a link to the exact font you want me to install? Google gave no definite results to "Styx fonts".

[Martin Robinson]

(In reply to comment #5)

> However, I'll of course try whether this helps. Could you give me a link to the exact font you want me to install? Google gave no definite results to "Styx fonts".

Apologies. I misspelled it. It's stix and on my system the package is otf-stix. Here's a link to the project page: http://www.stixfonts.org/

[ManDay]

I installed stix from Gentoo's repositories and checked whether they were properly accepted by fc.

However, no effect on MathML, as I suspected.

Note: I haven't found anyone with 1.10.2 for whom MathML worked!

[Martin Robinson]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I installed stix from Gentoo's repositories and checked whether they were properly accepted by fc.
> 
> However, no effect on MathML, as I suspected.
> 
> Note: I haven't found anyone with 1.10.2 for whom MathML worked!

Can you check whether it's working for you from the repository? I'm not sure if you're aware, but for 2.0 MathML is currently disabled by default due to security issues.

[ManDay]

(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> > I installed stix from Gentoo's repositories and checked whether they were properly accepted by fc.
> > 
> > However, no effect on MathML, as I suspected.
> > 
> > Note: I haven't found anyone with 1.10.2 for whom MathML worked!
> 
> Can you check whether it's working for you from the repository? I'm not sure if you're aware, but for 2.0 MathML is currently disabled by default due to security issues.

What do you mean try from the repository? Webkitgtk+'s repository? If so, which commit?

[Martin Robinson]

(In reply to comment #9)

> What do you mean try from the repository? Webkitgtk+'s repository? If so, which commit?

Yes, do you mind compiling WebKit from subversion/git, or failing that getting a more recent version of WebKit from the site. I can show you how to re-enable MathML manually (it's a bit tricky). 1.10 is quite old now.

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Created attachment 233518 [details]
Screenshot Nightly WebKitGTK+

After bug 133604, "Latin Modern Math" is used as the default font on Linux. I attach an updated screenshot with a trunk build. The reasoning here is that math people are likely to have a TeX distribution installed on their system and so a fortiori the Latin Modern font available, so missing math font for MathML becomes unlikely. This is of course not 100% sure and the result may be very different for each Linux distribution / user. I vaguely heard that the GUST group was working on another MATH font that could be installed by default on Linux. Another option to consider is autoinstallation via PackageKit (bug 22621).

Martin will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think stable WebKitGTK+ releases are each semester, so the recent MathML improvements are only likely to become available in early 2015.

Two more remarks:

* this is not really MathML rendering but MathML rendering "tweaked" by MathJax. In particular, I think the <mo> spacing is incorrect on the screenshot because of MathJax adds more space (https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/blob/master/unpacked/jax/output/NativeMML/jax.js#L1359).

* Authors of extensions for WebKitGTK+ browsers might consider something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mathjax-native-mathml/ (source: https://github.com/fred-wang/Mathzilla/tree/master/mathjax-native-mathml/data) if they want to force the native MathML output and remove some MathJax hacks.

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Same comment as bug 38377 comment 10 applies, here.

[Michael Catanzaro]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 38377 ***