> 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. Davide --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
