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mathjax / MathJax

Beautiful and accessible math in all browsers
http://www.mathjax.org/
Apache License 2.0
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Option for allowing text in SVG output #3174

Open netw0rkf10w opened 9 months ago

netw0rkf10w commented 9 months ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. This feature request is related to the following discussion on the quality of the SVG output on Apple devices: https://groups.google.com/g/mathjax-users/c/sN76v9z3nno

Describe the solution you'd like Instead of drawing everything, allowing text in the SVG output could produce higher quality while reducing the SVG file size.

Additional context Somebody has done it and the results are very good: https://bourne2learn.com/math/svgmath/svgmath-overview.php

dpvc commented 9 months ago

One of the reasons for the the SVG output was to produce self-contained SVG elements, and in particular, ones that did not rely on web fonts. Originally, this also helped with speed (not having to wait for web-based fonts), and gave a more consistent result, since at the time the first SVG output renderer was written, the quality of text rendering varied widely across browsers and OS.

The landscape is different now, and it is certainly possible to do one that does use web fonts, like the one you point to. That is not something that is high on our priority lis, however, though it is something that could be a third-party contribution. I have not yet finished investigating the issue with iOS, and hope that there is something that can be done within the current framework to improve the situation there.

One question I have is, if you want text output, why use SVG for this rather than the CommonHTML output?

You indicate that the SVG files will be smaller, but remember that you gain that by offloading the character data into the font files, and so you need to take the size of those into account, as well. This external dependency also means you have more points of potential failure. You wither have to provide the needed fonts in addition to the SVG file, or have access to a network to download them when the SVG is viewed. That also complicates the references to the fonts: will one assume the user has the fonts installed on their system, or will you refer to web fonts, and for the latter, are they expected to be locally installed (using file: URLs), or over the net (using `https: URLs)?