On Jan 29, 2008 7:11 AM, dpvc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > What is the current status of your sprite fonts plugin? That seems like > > that would address the size issues. > > It was a nice idea, but turned out to have some serious drawbacks. It > really slowed down IE (it appears that IE renders the entire image > behind the scenes even though only a tiny portion is showing), and > since it was already too slow to begin with, it made it unbearably > so. Firefox works unexpectedly slowly on the hi-res fonts for > printing. Also, Opera (at the time) had a bug that prevented the > clipped images from being positioned properly, and so I had to use > background images, and that meant they didn't print unless the user > turned on printing of backgrounds. I haven't checked recently to see > if Opera has fixed that bug or not. Firefox on the PC did not show > print previewing correctly, but did print correctly. On the other > hand, Opera on the PC previews correctly, but prints incorrectly. (It > seems that print previewing on the PC is not very closely tied to the > actual print results.) There were also other printing issues, and > since every character has to be put into separate clipping boxes and > aligned properly by hand, there are noticeable baseline alignment > issues at times, and the resulting HTML is considerably more complex. > > In the end, it seems that the sprite-based image fonts were just too > fragile and browser dependent, so I have not continued development on > that front. Indeed, I'm not sure they still work with the current > version of jsMath (I haven't tested them in a while). On the other > hand, there are new versions of Opera and IE since I worked on the > sprite fonts, so perhaps the situation has improved. > > > what is the possibility that > > we could automagically extract the character images on the server side > > and send those, so that from the client, it would appear as if the > > original image fonts plugin was loaded. > > Well, it probably could be done through some sort of CGI interface, > but it seems to me that it would be likely slow jsMath down even > further. It also violates one of the important design decisions for > jsMath, which is not to reply on programs running on the server. And > if you are going to start running things on the server, why not just > process the complete formula on the server with one of the many > possible choices of tex->image rendering (mimeTeX, BlahTeX, dvipng, > etc)? It seems pretty inefficient to process individual characters > one at a time. Maybe it would help to have the results cached, but > they isn't that really just the same as having the individual images > all there initially? > > It may be possible to reduce the number of sizes used by perhaps not > use the very largest and smallest sizes, but the large ones are there > for the hi-res printing, so you might have to lose that. It might > also be possible to leave out every other size, but that would mean > the math might not match the text size quite so well. You could > probably cut the image font size in half or more that way. But is it > really worth it? in these days 100 of 200 GB hard drives, is 80 MB > all that much? That's about 50 images from my digital camera, or just > about two rolls of traditional film. I have single sound files that > are larger than that. > > The real solution is, of course, to install the jsMath TeX fonts and > avoid the whole issue. For a private installation (like I expect most > sage installations are), where you are the only person looking at the > web pages that use jsMath, it is reasonable not to install the image > fonts because once you have the jsMath TeX fonts, there is no need for > anything else. On the other hand, if you are hosting a public site, > where you don't know whether your reader has installed the fonts or > not, then you have to decide whether it is worth the space in order to > give those users a better view of the mathematics on your site. My > own feeling is that the image fonts are so much superior to the > unicode results that it is worth it to me (because I know that most > people won't install the TeX fonts, so image-font mode turns out to be > the primary mode used by most viewers). While I would like a method > with a smaller footprint on the server, I haven't found one that is as > reliable and maintainable as the image fonts.
You've convinced me. We'll make an optional spkg that people can install on servers to enable this functionality: http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/1971 William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
