I've tried this feature before, and the issue (as you noted) is
partially that MathML isn't supported by all clients, but even worse it
doesn't degrade gracefully. So people in email threads are frequently
unable to read my rendered HTML message, as (AFAIK) gmail just strips
mathML when displaying, and this completely destroys the content of the
message. Then people have to switch to viewing the plaintext message,
which loses my other formatting and is annoying (also some math people
are pretty non-technical). So, unfortunately, mathML is un-usable for
nice math in email if you need to communicate frequently with a rotating
cast of people, just owing to how rough the ecosystem for it is.
In a perfect would, I would send two-part messages with a normal
markdown HTML render, but people using mailmate or some other reasonable
client could use markdown+mathjax on the text/plain chunk of the message
to render it nicely in their local viewer.
Another solution is automatically turning on the MathML bundle _only_
for specific recipients who have known-good email clients; ie math gets
rendered as plaintext for everyone who isn't whitelisted, because I
often have email threads that have to go between some people who have
good email software and some who don't. This seem like it might be even
worse than the above, because then it breaks threading, because
different recipients are getting truly different messages... Maybe you
could bundle all three objects into a message, and have mailmate prefer
an HTML+MathML part? Could it be ensured that bad email clients only try
to render the no-mathML HTML?
Anyway I realize that this is a super-niche concern. Would that the
world was a better place for MathML. But now that I'm reminded of the
feature I can at least try and get all my mac friends on MailMate for
it, and grow a little circle of people sending emails to each other with
math that actually looks decent.
best,
-- marco
On 13 Jun 2017, at 7:09, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
On 13 Jun 2017, at 15:49, Marco Carmosino wrote:
For whatever it's worth, another application of javascript in MM web
view executed on plain-text messages is rendering equations. My
friends often send me markdown sprinkled with latex, and if I could
run mathjax in MM web view, this would make a lot of my email _way_
more readable. Nicely rendered equations instead of stuff like
`$g_{i,j}(z) = f(z|_{S_{i}})$` scattered all over would make my life
a lot easier. Heck, this would probably help me sell a few copies of
mailmate -- email with readable equations is a killer feature for
mathematicians, and currently there's _no_ good solution for this
anywhere.
MailMate doesn't use MathJax exactly because of its reliance on
Javascript, but MailMate does support the use of MathML. Its
usefulness depends on the receiving email client, but it works quite
well in MailMate:
~~~math
((n(n+1))/2)^2
~~~
It can also be used inline, ``a^2 + b^2 = c^2``. There's both a TeX
variant and an ASCIIMath variant.
It is documented
[here](https://manual.mailmate-app.com/preferences#html-styling).
--
Benny
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