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Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

November 21, 2005

Squashed Bugs

Hard on the heels of fixing bug 228804, which, for years, had bedevilled the rendering of MathML in Mozilla/Mac, Yamashita Makoto has been busy fixing other bugs.

  • The disappearing minus sign bug is now fixed, so you don’t need to map U+2212 to some explicit choice of font, as I recommended previously.
  • The Symbol font is now recognized, and can be used with MathML.
  • Most surprisingly, Computer Modern Fonts can now be used with Mozilla (at least, in MacOSX 10.4).
    1. Download the CM/PS Fonts (and, if you want, the AMS/PS Fonts as well).
    2. Grab the screen fonts files from the Screen Fonts folder and drag it into the PS Fonts folder
    3. Drag the PS Fonts folder into /Library/Fonts or ~/Library/Fonts

Now, that sounds wonderful. But, alas, it is not a panacea. The nice calligraphic letters in CMSY10, or the blackboard bold letter in MSBM10, or the fraktur letters in EUFM10 still won’t work in Mozilla. There’s no way, apparently, to remap Plane-1 characters, so you still need to rely on a Unicode font like Code2001.

And there are more glitches. The circumflex accent gets rendered too high, when used in MathML. So do =, +, and × (but not −), because (apparently) they’re taken from some stupid fallback font, instead of one of the desired mathematical fonts.

Still, it’s real progress. And Makoto is even offering a version of Camino with MathML support enabled. So, if you want a MathML-capable Cocoa browser, Makoto’s your man …

Inline SVG

On a completely different topic, Firefox nightly builds are now SVG-enabled. That’s slightly old news. What’s new is that the native SVG support coexists nicely with the Adobe plugin. The native SVG support is missing some key features (no font-module support, for instance), so it doesn’t work properly with the SVG figures we use here at Musings. Fortunately, the Adobe plugin handles those just fine. On the other hand, the Adobe plugin doesn’t work at all with inline SVG (as used by … well, OK, nobody’s actually using inline SVG for anything other than the odd cutesy demo; but they could1), which is handled reasonably well by the native SVG support.

1 What with Opera 8 supporting SVG and support in the works in Safari, too, you’d think a few people might figure out some use for it.

Posted by distler at November 21, 2005 12:41 AM

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