Please show community consensus for this change to take place.

myjunk1710 wrote:

They told me to come here and ask why this is the behavior.

conrad.irwin wrote:

The reason it was initially chosen is in some ways using HTML is nicer, copy-paste works, as does text-selection and it's easy for blind people to read, saves (a little) bandwidth and resources etc.

The reason it's still like that is that there's no need to change it, and no burning desire to do so. It can be changed on a per-project basis if you can link to a demonstration of community consensus. Please feel free to reopen the bug with such a link.

myjunk1710 wrote:

Thank you for your reply, I have undergone a long discussion, and suddenly the font was changed to a serif, and it seems that currently the HTML rendering is quite adequate. We have also changed locally (on Hebrew wikipedia) the size and spacing of the font so that it is quite nice.

myjunk1710 wrote:

Hello again, I thought it was resolved, but it was not. It all depends on the fonts installed. The HTML font is Serif, which is not included in all OS/browsers, so the result is strongly system dependent.

Therefore I have reached a consensus on the hebre wikipedia, please see
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%95%D7%A7:%D7%9E#Voting_for_the_proposal_to_render_equations_as_PNG_as_default

this is a vote in the hebrew wikipedia village pump.
Thank you,
Setreset

I have no idea if this is something that should be done, but they have community consensus so I'm moving to right component and adding the shell keyword.

From what I can see (looking at maths as an extension), there doesn't seem to be a way to set the default maths preference...

Needs checking in with brion

-shell for now (till it's actually actionable)

cc'ing brion.

I'd recommend removing the preferences entirely.

• "HTML if simple" and "if possible" produce *horrible* ugly output that nobody likes, so people use hacks to force PNG rendering. Why not just render to PNG?
• "MathML" mode is even *MORE* limited than "HTML if simple", making it entirely useless.
• nobody even knows what "Recommended for modern browsers" means, but it seems to be somewhere in that "occasionally crappy HTML, usually PNG" continuum.

So we're left with only two sane choices:

• Always render PNG
• Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)

Text browsers will show the alt text on the images, which is... the TeX code. So even this isn't actually needed for its stated purpose.

It's conceivable that a few folks really honestly prefer to see the latex source (should at least do a quick stat check to see if anybody uses it on purpose), but I wouldn't mind removing that either.

wikimedia.x.0x wrote:

(In reply to comment #9)

• Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)

Text browsers will show the alt text on the images, which is... the TeX code.
So even this isn't actually needed for its stated purpose.

It's conceivable that a few folks really honestly prefer to see the latex
source (should at least do a quick stat check to see if anybody uses it on
purpose), but I wouldn't mind removing that either.

Not only for text browsers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax

Bump. What should we do to make this happen?

You may want to look on bug 31406, which is related.
Best regards

It is related but not the same.

The guys in he.wiki asked to change the rendering of math formulas (which I assume to be a change in a flag by someone with shell access) over a year ago.

I'm glad that we're moving to something new which is probably better equipped than what we have but until that happens somewhere on the unknown horizon we would appreciate it very much if you could change the rendering method for us. Once all wikis switch to MathJax we'll be happy to move with them.

Once all wikis switch to MathJax we'll be happy to move with them.

Are there even any (concrete) plans to do this. If there are, they are probably a long way off.

but back to this bug.

What needs to be done from a developer side:
$wgDefaultUserOptions['math'] = 0; // Always PNG is option 0

What needs to be done from the perspective of the people wanting this (english and hebrew wikipedias based on comment 0):
You need to have a community discussion/vote/etc to show that there is community consensus to make the change. Once you do that, and if the result is in your favour, please add a link to the discussion to this bug.

We already did that on he.wiki. Here's the link to the discussion: http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97%D7%AA_%D7%A2%D7%96%D7%A8%D7%94:%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%97%D7%90%D7%95%D7%AA#Voting_for_the_proposal_to_render_equations_as_PNG_as_default

The discussion itself happened on the village pump but was later archived to a page about formulas.

Done

Thanks