I realized that I needed a good way of displaying equations. Rather than going the graphical route, I decided to try MathML. If you are using Internet Explorer, you will need either IBM Techexplorer ($27, 30-day trial) or Design Science MathPlayer (free... at the moment). Design Science are the same people who make MathType and Equation Editor in Microsoft Word - so I doubt it will remain free long. I've included a link to MathPlayer on the right hand column under "Tools". Incidentally, if you are using the latest version of Netscape, Amaya or Mozilla you don't have to download anything. For more details click here. Unfortunately, it's still not quite working perfectly on this blog, as it is designed to be in XML not XHTML. It does work for IE users with MathPlayer installed though.
MathPlayer. If you are willing to lock your users to using IE6 and MathPlayer, you can following the instructions at Design Science. This is obviously not ideal, but I had a hard time getting anything else to work though MovableType does use XHTML. The problem with this setup is that MoveableType inserts a "br" each time you press enter. This totally mixes up the MathML and messes up the equation. To get it to work, you must have no carriage returns anywhere between m:math and /m:math.
This is a MathPlayer test:
Generalization. There must be a way to make it so that we don't have to lock ourselves into using MathPlayer, however, the way is not yet evident. I found some tips on parsing MathML at the w3.org website that don't work. I can write xml that will work but in xhtml we may well need to declare the MathPlayer object. If you are using Linux, this page probably even gave you an error!
Posted by torque at April 3, 2003 2:09 PMWe have promised to make MathPlayer free and to keep it so, as stated in our press releases. Think of it as another instance of the Adobe Acrobat approach to marketing -- we give the viewer away for free in order to increase the market for our authoring tools.
There have been some recent MathPlayer items worth mentioning:
- We have been working with Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon, to make things work with MathML embedded in HTML blog entries. MathPlayer just works with some blog readers already, but we would be glad to work with others to make that happen.
- Jacques Distler hosts a couple of MathML-enabled blogs:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/string/
We have been working with him to make this happen.
- MathPlayer 2.0 has just been releases with docs that should be up by the end of the week. Unlike 1.x, MP2 makes IE work directly with XHTML+MathML without the use of a stylesheet.
If people have questions about how to deal with MathML inside things like blogs or about our policies regarding our software, I would wish in future that such people would actually engage us in dialog. Although our software works with Microsoft, we are most definitely not Microsoft. In fact, we would like to introduce MathPlayer functionality into other browsers and would gladly work with their developers to make it happen.
Paul Topping
Design Science, Inc.
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