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PreTeXt: an authoring and publishing system for scholarly documents
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Warn about backticks #1620

Closed davidfarmer closed 2 years ago

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

Backticks, or maybe just double backticks, in the HTML cause MathJax to choke.

If these are in the PreTeXt source, ``like this'', an error or a warning should the given.

Not sure if those ever have a legitimate purpose in PreTeXt source?

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

I think the problem is that it triggers ASCIIMath in MathJax.

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

Now I think the problem is that MathJax should only be configured to look for AsciiMath in certain places, such as the answers to reading questions.

This problem has probably existed since we started using MathJax3. Nothing wrong with MathJax3, but when we switched, we did not set it up properly. Problems in the sample article backticks paragraph, for example:

https://pretextbook.org/examples/sample-article/html/text-in-paragraphs.html#p-380

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

I guess I'd forgotten about .has_am. You must be injecting it via Javascript, since I only see it in the XSL in the MathJax configuration.

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

When an answer to a reading question is submitted, the has_am class is added.

Currently everything is processed as AsciiMath. Once I fix that, I have to check that it didn't break reading questions.

On Wed, 6 Oct 2021, Rob Beezer wrote:

I guess I'd forgotten about .has_am. You must be injecting it via Javascript, since I only see it in the XSL in the MathJax configuration.

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davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

Bad news: MathJax3 does not distinguish between TeX and AsciiMath. So it is impossible to turn off AsciiMath and only use it in selected places.

So we do need a warning. Not sure if we can do something like we do with slash-paren in the source, where it appears literally in the HTML and does not trigger MathJax.

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

Because slash-paren is two characters, we "break" it by putting a zero-width space in the middle for it's (unlikely) occurrence in regular text.

Can we configure MathJax to do asciimath based on two characters and maybe pre-process the source to this form. What about the actual HTML tags that signal math? Why are we fighting ad-hoc markup?

Certainly something here I'm not understanding correctly.

On October 8, 2021 4:08:24 PM PDT, "David W. Farmer" @.***> wrote:

Bad news: MathJax3 does not distinguish between TeX and AsciiMath. So it is impossible to turn off AsciiMath and only use it in selected places.

So we do need a warning. Not sure if we can do something like we do with slash-paren in the source, where it appears literally in the HTML and does not trigger MathJax.

Alex-Jordan commented 2 years ago

Because slash-paren is two characters, we "break" it by putting a zero-width space in the middle for it's (unlikely) occurrence in regular text.

Side note: This can drive a person nuts. Copy-paste and "why won't it work?!?!?"

If a character is &#'-ed (like \ to \) does that block MathJax? Or is it too late once the browser has turned it back into \?

Alex-Jordan commented 2 years ago

Here is something to consider: https://spot.pcc.edu/~ajordan/temp/mathjaxtest.html

If you wrap a span around each MathJax delimiter, that prevents MathJax from latching onto it.

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

We know exactly where the math lies. So set ignoreHtmlClass to ignoreme and then set processHtmlClass to processme.

Then we output, for example:

<body class="ignoreme">
<span class="processme">$x^2$</span>
</body>

I understand this is how these options behave together: https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/options/document.html#document-options

Replace the dollar signs by backticks for an ASCIImath example (which battles markdown right here!).

David's use case is readers submitting reading question answers using ASCIImath (I think!). Would it be feasible to process an answer into this scheme?

Advantage: we get rid of texjax_ignore on elements such as those holding verbatim text, we stop breaking TeX constructs (\(, \begin{align}) with zero-widthspaces. We stop having to be on the lookout for poorly-designed markup!!!

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

Some crude experimentation with the ignoreme/processme classes idea. We already put a div around display math, so that was a natural place to experiment. Everything works as expected.

I even unwound the zero-width space from within textual \( and it behaves as-desired.

Caught one caveat: have to process the element defining all the macros!

As we move ahead with MathJax 3 configuration options, I'm afraid we will be making changes that are hard to support within the Jupyter conversion. We might just have to accept that, but perhaps some investigation of Jupyter configuration will reveal a better situation than expected.

To run with this will require some nontrivial refactoring. But it may also allow us to support ASCIImath within any PreTeXt math element, or at least <m>.

@davidfarmer: if has_am goes away, can you wrap any use of ASCIImath in reading questions in a suitable span.processme.

Yes, I will use better class names!

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

1) I added "processme" to the answer javascript, so that can be tested.

2) The WeBWorK javascript also contains the MathJax configuration, so that is another place to update once we know the new setup.

3) I am in the midst of a CSS upgrade (from 0.31 to 0.4) and am thinking we also need a JavaScript upgrade.

4) Doesn't Alex's recent work on inline math nobreak make it easy to wrap inline math in a .processme?

On Mon, 11 Oct 2021, Rob Beezer wrote:

Some crude experimentation with the ignoreme/processme classes idea. We already put a div around display math, so that was a natural place to experiment. Everything works as expected.

I even unwound the zero-width space from within textual ( and it behaves as-desired.

Caught one caveat: have to process the element defining all the macros!

As we move ahead with MathJax 3 configuration options, I'm afraid we will be making changes that are hard to support within the Jupyter conversion. We might just have to accept that, but perhaps some investigation of Jupyter configuration will reveal a better situation than expected.

To run with this will require some nontrivial refactoring. But it may also allow us to support ASCIImath within any PreTeXt math element, or at least .

@davidfarmer: if has_am goes away, can you wrap any use of ASCIImath in reading questions in a suitable span.processme.

Yes, I will use better class names!

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Alex-Jordan commented 2 years ago

4) Doesn't Alex's recent work on inline math nobreak make it easy to wrap inline math in a .processme?

1590 is the relevant recent PR. The modal "inline-math-wrapper" template will make it easy to add a span.processme.

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

Right, #1590 will be a big help. Just hads not looked closely at it yet. Thanks for adding the class.

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

Built AATA:

https://pretextbook.org/beta/2021-10-13-reading-answers/reading-questions-1.html

(reading-questions-2 is there also, but nothing else)

Some ASCIIMath errors in the console, not sure if that is related. Noob that I am, I could even see "processme" in a plce that looked reasonable. I dropped "has_am" from the PTX MJ configuration in the above example, got a similar experience before trying that.

Rob

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

Apparently I had never updated the reading questions code to work with MathJax3. I just did, and those seem to work for me.

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

I had never updated

I was suspicious. ;-) Thanks for the quick check. I think we have proof-of-concept. I'll need to do more work to check on danger downstream (Jupyter, mostly). So, more to do, but I think this will be a big improvement.

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

I also want to check on the rendering time for pages with substantial amounts of math. I think it should be the same, since either way the whole tree has to be traversed to identify what needs to be rendered. But better to check for sure.

On Wed, 13 Oct 2021, Rob Beezer wrote:

  I had never updated

I was suspicious. ;-) Thanks for the quick check. I think we have proof-of-concept. I'll need to do more work to check on danger downstream (Jupyter, mostly). So, more to do, but I think this will be a big improvement.

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rbeezer commented 2 years ago

check on the rendering time

Right. I'd thought about this. I'll definitely make a beta. My prediction: faster, but imperceptible.

Once inside an ignore'd element, all of the "text" nodes can be skipped. But I think this entire phase is not the real time-sink.

rbeezer commented 2 years ago

Backticks outside of math contexts will not be seen by MathJax now, with d5ef68ffa5ab5262a4a4f07258596ccb9f2f9790

So no need for warnings, and authors can continue to use their keyboards to make whatever nasty strings they wish.