Tex Teubner set

[hartman]

It might be nice to expand the current selection of Tex packages with parts of the teubner set of greek symbols.

Wikipedia's uses the following Teubner commands in their texvc, for use in articles containing ancient greek numerals and arithmetic:
\Coppa, \coppa, \varcoppa, \Digamma, \Koppa, \koppa, \Sampi, \sampi, \Stigma, \stigma, \varstigma
Some are additions, some are redefines of AMS.

http://archive.cs.uu.nl/mirror/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/teubner/teubner-doc.pdf
There might be some fontsupport work in this, due to changed glyphs over the course of history....

Related to: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/4060 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/35186

[fred-wang]

Thanks for the report.

So IIUC, the changes to the TeX parser would be easy:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/4060/3/modules/MathJax/extensions/TeX/texvc.js

but I'm not sure the MathJax TeX fonts have the appropriate glyphs, so they should be added.

[hartman]

yes, the Tex fonts indeed, and possibly some work needs to be done on italics typeface. I made a few attempts, but I'm not sure how that typeface stuff works in mathjax.

[pkra]

@fred-wang are those glyphs covered by one of the new fonts in v2.3?

[fred-wang]

I guess this is probably already covered by STIX and I suspect that's on of the reason why @hartman wanted to use the local STIX fonts on MediaWiki when they are installed. The problem with STIX fonts is that most people prefer something that looks like the Computer Modern Font. Other options:

• Use the Latin Modern font, I haven't verified for these glyphs but the unicode coverage is better than the MathJax TeX fonts. The problem is that they are only available as Web fonts (because MathJax can't get all the glyphs with the local version) and that they may be bigger (so slower to download).
• Add the glyphs to the MathJax fonts. This raises the same issue as what we discussed for the stretchy horizontal parenthesis (issue Update some glyphs from the MathJax fonts used to stretch operators #316): how do we provide a new version of these fonts and how do we deal with obsolete local versions? Note that there exist packages to install the MathJax fonts in Debian testing, Ubuntu and Mint so they may be a bit more common on users' computer now.
• Consider mixed fonts for better unicode coverage.

[dpvc]

There is also the issue of where to get the glyph. We would have to check the licensing on the TeX font that contains the needed symbols. Not all of them are public domain (the original CM fonts are, but some of the additional fonts aren't).

[physikerwelt]

Seems to be still a problem in 2.3
http://math-test2.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wiki/537

[pkra]

@physikerwelt could you clarify what you mean by "still a problem"? This bug is open and has not seen any work (neither in terms of implementing the package nor in terms of adding characters to the MathJax fonts). It should be possible to implement these if the STIX fonts are used (e.g. for SVG generation such as Media Wiki).

On a side note, Teubner seems to be more about text mode than math mode. Since MathJax focuses on math mode, I understand the OP as being about a small set of macros for unicode characters in math mode. If that's a mistake, let us know.

[physikerwelt]

I was referring to the discussion at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/4060/3/modules/MathJax/extensions/TeX/texvc.js.
I was wondering if those special symbols (that have been defined in texvc but are not very widely used) can be rendered by MathJaX now.

PS:
The background is that I wanted to clean up the bugs of the math extension.

[pkra]

Ok, that's what I had hoped :) I think the STIX fonts should have the relevant Unicode coverage to define macros using MathJax's \unicode command (see http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/tex.html#unicode-support). Of course this means you have to use STIX fonts in mathoid.

It's not quite clear to me how http://math-test2.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wiki/537 and https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/4060/3/modules/MathJax/extensions/TeX/texvc.js go together. It seems the macros are defined, so MathJax shouldn't spit out TeX commands. I would expect to see Unicode strings in the SVG (i.e. falling back to systems fonts). Does this happen with user-side MathJax on Wikipedia as well or just with mathoid?

(BTW, we can alwasy merge the texvc macros back into the MathJax repository as an extension if that helps.)