https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29544
--- Comment #5 from Richard Tollerton <[email protected]> 2011-06-23 20:36:35 UTC --- There are a few knobs that could be tweaked on the TeX side of things, in decreasing order of potential magnitude: * Computer Modern is known to be a really light font on the screen, and there are a few potentially darker alternatives. A really good overview of the math font selections available for TeX is at http://mirrors.med.harvard.edu/ctan/info/Free_Math_Font_Survey/survey.pdf. There's also the LaTeX Font Catalogue at http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/mathfonts.html. * The weight of Computer Modern does not scale proportionally with increasing point side -- strokes are relatively thicker at smaller point sizes. In principle, this means that you might be able to get a weightier font, looking better at gamma 2.2, by reducing the point size and increasing the DPI setting. But I don't know how big of an effect this has. * Various outline versions of Computer Modern are tweaked slightly differently, and some versions are considered darker than others. See for instance this discussion: http://arxiv.org/help/pscm. The only other particularly useful rendering alternative I'm aware of is dvips+convert, which of course already appears to be implemented. I haven't yet studied if that would generate any better of an output than dvipng does. (dvipng also appears to be applying the inverse gamma setting from what it should be, insofar as gamma 0.454545 *darkens* the image in any image editor.) Besides that, yeah, something like MathJax would also solve this issue by offloading the actual text rendering to the client. Certainly the darker gamma setting can be justified in terms of maximum compatibility, even if perhaps it wasn't necessarily chosen for that reason. And while gamma 2.2 might be "the best" in terms of lowest distortion -- ie, the closest representation of a high-resolution printout of the same equation -- given that we're talking about web pages and not printed pages, using a gamma significantly lower than 2.2 may be quite reasonable. There are always tradeoffs of course. --- On the subject of possibly selecting a better dvipng gamma setting, I have some new images: * I've replaced the original comparison image with a new one, with a 5th sample -- a screen cap of the equation PDF drawn in Adobe Acrobat. It looks great of course (it's kinda their job to look great hehe), but it also looks both much lighter than the Wikipedia rendering (#1) but much darker than my resized rendering (#3). * I've also uploaded a comparison of dvipng gamma settings from 0.5-1.5, along with the Acrobat rendering, to perhaps help select a new default dvipng gamma setting. Pay close attention to the integral sign between the Acrobat rendering and *any* of the dvipng renders for gamma >0.5 -- very interesting. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
