alexr_rwx: (Default)
Alex R ([personal profile] alexr_rwx) wrote2009-09-09 10:04 am

posting from office hours!

If you have any questions about introductory CS, or maybe about life, feel free to come see me. I'm in room 112 for the next hour or so.

Also: Lindsey [livejournal.com profile] lindseykuper and I are both extremely signed up for the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon. Big running, here we come!

I'm enjoying my classes; for two of them, I've been busy LaTeX'ing up some basic problems about probability. It's good practice; I want to be fluent with both probability and LaTeX.

That said, I think I'm developing a distaste for PDFs. (Portable Document Format, not Probability Density Functions) We have this fantastic system for distributing documents (the web), and nice programs for viewing those documents, wherein you can easily search, copy, paste, highlight, resize and restyle the text. But we don't use those for serious academic papers. That seems dumb. Although I guess it doesn't help that MathML is pretty clunky.

I suppose a possible approach is just using LaTeX as a source language, and converting it to HTML/MathML for reading online, and a PDF for printing. (what's the best tool for that?)

Edited to add! Well, it turns out that browser support for MathML is pretty shaky. I just installed some extra Math Fonts, and my Firefox 3.5 renders MathML just fine. But Chrome (or really, browsers other than Mozilla and Opera) don't do so well at it, and IE doesn't do MathML at all without a plugin.
ext_110843: (alexr beta)

Re: MathML in WebKit

[identity profile] oniugnip.livejournal.com 2009-09-13 03:25 am (UTC)(link)
That's pretty exciting! :) Maybe there'll be more use of MathML once support is wider.

Quite a lot of articles out there would benefit, I suppose -- do you think there's interest? Maybe it wouldn't be worth switching big chunks of the web until it works in IE too?

Re: MathML in WebKit

[identity profile] samarin.livejournal.com 2009-09-15 03:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I wouldn't be surprised if IE never supports MathML. :(