As I mentioned three months ago, I wanted to start a crowdfunding campaign so that I can have more time to devote to MathML developments in browsers and (at least for Mozilla) continue to mentor volunteer contributors. Rather than doing several crowdfunding campaigns for small features, I finally decided to do a single crowdfunding campaign with Ulule so that I only have to worry only once about the funding. This also sounded more convenient for me to rely on some French/EU website regarding legal issues, taxes etc. Also, just like Kickstarter it's possible with Ulule to offer some "rewards" to backers according to the level of contributions, so that gives a better way to motivate them.
As everybody following MathML activities noticed, big companies/organizations do not want to significantly invest in funding MathML developments at the moment. So the rationale for a crowdfunding campaign is to rely on the support of the current community and on the help of smaller companies/organizations that have business interest in it. Each one can give a small contribution and these contributions sum up in enough money to fund the project. Of course this model is probably not viable for a long term perspective, but at least this allows to start something instead of complaining without acting ; and to show bigger actors that there is a demand for these developments. As indicated on the Ulule Website, this is a way to start some relationship and to build a community around a common project. My hope is that it could lead to a long term funding of MathML developments and better partnership between the various actors.
Because one of the main demand for MathML (besides accessibility) is in EPUB, I've included in the project goals a collection of documents that demonstrate advanced Web features with native MathML. That way I can offer more concrete rewards to people and federate them around the project. Indeed, many of the work needed to improve the MathML rendering requires some preliminary "code refactoring" which is not really exciting or immediately visible to users...
Hence I launched the crowdfunding campaign the 19th of November and we reached 1/3 of the minimal funding goal in only three days! This was mainly thanks to the support of individuals from the MathML community. In mid december we reached the minimal funding goal after a significant contribution from the KWARC Group (Jacobs University Bremen, Germany) with which I have been in communication since the launch of the campaign. Currently, we are at 125% and this means that, minus the Ulule commision and my social/fiscal obligations, I will be able to work on the project during about 3 months.
I'd like to thank again all the companies, organizations and people who have supported the project so far! The crowdfunding campaign continues until the end of January so I hope more people will get involved. If you want better MathML in Web rendering engines and ebooks then please support this project, even a symbolic contribution. If you want to do a more significant contribution as a company/organization then note that Ulule is only providing a service to organize the crowdfunding campaign but otherwise the funding is legally treated the same as required by my self-employed status; feel free to contact me for any questions on the project or funding and discuss the long term perspective.
Finally, note that I've used my savings and I plan to continue like that until the official project launch in February. Below is a summary of what have been done during the five weeks before the holiday season. This is based on my weekly updates for supporters where you can also find references to the Bugzilla entries. Thanks to the Apple & Mozilla developers who spent time to review my patches!
Collection of documents
The goal is to show how to use existing tools (LaTeXML, itex2MML, tex4ht etc) to build EPUB books for science and education using Web standards. The idea is to cover various domains (maths, physics, chemistry, education, engineering...) as well as Web features. Given that
many scientific circles are too much biased by "math on paper / PDF" and closed research practices, it may look innovative to use the Open Web but to be honest the MathML language and its integration with other Web formats is well established for a long time. Hence in theory it should "just work" once you have native MathML support, without any circonvolutions or hacks. Here are a couple of features that are tested in the sample EPUB books that I wrote:
Rendering of MathML equations (of course!). Since the screen size and resolution vary for e-readers, automatic line breaking / reflowing of the page is "naturally" tested and is an important distinction with respect to paper / PDF documents.
CSS styling of the page and equations. This includes using (Web) fonts,
which are very important for mathematical publishing.
Using SVG schemas and how they can be mixed with MathML equations.
Using non-ASCII (Arabic) characters and RTL/LTR rendering of both the text and equations.
Interactive document using Javascript and
, ,
etc. For those who are curious, I've created some videos for an algebra course and a lab practical.
Using the
element to include short sequences of an experiment in a physics course.
Using the
element to draw graphs of functions or of physical measurements.
Using WebGL to draw interactive 3D schemas. At the moment, I've only adapted a chemistry course and used ChemDoodle to load Crystallographic Information Files (CIF) and provide 3D-representation of crystal structures. But of course, there is not any problem to put MathML equations in WebGL to create other kinds of scientific 3D schemas.
WebKit
I've finished some work started as a MathJax developer, including the maction support requested by the KWARC Group. I then tried to focus on the main goals: rendering of token elements and more specifically operators (spacing and stretching).
I improved LTR/RTL handling of equations (full RTL support is not implemented yet and not part of the project goal).
I improved the maction elements and implemented the toggle actiontype.
I refactored the code of some "mrow-like" elements to make them all behave like an
element. For example while WebKit stretched (some) operators in
elements it could not stretch them in
,
etc Similarly, this will be needed to implement correct spacing around operators in
and other "mrow-like" elements.
I analyzed more carefully the vertical stretching of operators. I see at least two serious bugs to fix: baseline alignment and stretch size. I've uploaded an experimental patch to improve that.
Preliminary work on the MathML Operator Dictionary. This dictionary contains various properties of operators like spacing and stretchiness and is fundamental for later work on operators.
I have started to refactor the code for mi, mo and mfenced elements. This is also necessary for many serious bugs like the operator dictionary and the style of mi elements.
I have written a patch to restore support for foreign objects in annotation-xml elements and to implement the same selection algorithm as Gecko.
Gecko
I've continued to clean up the MathML code and to mentor volunteer contributors. The main goal is the support for the Open Type MATH table, at least for operator stretching.
Xuan Hu's work on the
element landed in trunk. This element is used to modify the spacing of equations, for example by some TeX-to-MathML generators.
On Linux, I fixed a bug with preferred widths of MathML token elements. Concretely, when equations are used inside table cells or similar containers there is a bug that makes equations overflow the containers. Unfortunately, this bug is still present on Mac and Windows...
James Kitchener implemented the mathvariant attribute (e.g used by some tools to write symbols like double-struck, fraktur etc). This also fixed remaining issues with preferred widths of MathML token elements. Khaled Hosny started
to update his Amiri and XITS fonts to add the glyphs for Arabic mathvariants.
I finished Quentin Headen's code refactoring of mtable. This allowed to fix some bugs like bad alignment with columnalign. This is also a preparation for future support for rowspacing and columnspacing.
After the two previous points, it was finally possible to remove the private "_moz-" attributes. These were visible in the DOM or when manipulating MathML via Javascript (e.g. in editors, tree inspector, the html5lib etc)
Khaled Hosny fixed a regression with script alignments. He started to work on improvements regarding italic correction when positioning scripts. Also, James Kitchener made some progress on script size correction via the Open Type "ssty" feature.
I've refactored the stretchy operator code and prepared some patches to read the OpenType MATH table. You can try experimental support for new math fonts with e.g. Bill Gianopoulos' builds and the MathML Torture Tests.
Blink/Trident
MathML developments in Chrome or Internet Explorer is not part of the
project goal,
even if obviously MathML improvements to WebKit could
hopefully be imported to Blink in the future. Users keep asking for MathML in IE and I hope that a solution will be found to save MathPlayer's work. In the meantime, I've sent a proposal to Google and Microsoft to implement fallback content (alttext and semantics annotation) so that authors can use it. This is just a couple of CSS rules that could be integrated in the user agent style sheet. Let's see which of the two companies is the most reactive...