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mathrendermediawiki-extensions

How to embed maths in MediaWiki

I'm trying to transfer some maths content from and old wiki to my new MediaWiki.

The old page uses MathJax, and looks like this:

Here is the k-degree Taylor series for [[$ f(x) $]] 
    expanding around [[$ x=0 $]]  

[[$ T_k(x) = f(0) + x\cdot f'(0) + \frac{x^2}{2!} f''(0) + \dots
     + \frac{x^k}{k!} f^k(0) $]]

This is what I've found so far:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MathJax -- appears to be discontinued.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleMathJax -- I tried this and it works on OSX Chrome but gives rendering errors on OSX FireFox (https://github.com/jmnote/SimpleMathJax/issues/1)

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Math -- this appears to be where the active development is occurring, but I haven't managed to get it working. Also it is a huge headache.

Have I missed anything?

What's the right way to enable maths content in a MediaWiki?

From what I can see, it is looking like: "render on server and provide PNG is faster, render on client using MathJax is simpler/cleaner"

SimpleMathJax is an absolutely minimal install. If only it worked on Firefox!

Math extension is looking like hard work, it looks like overkill -- it seems to support at least 4 different techniques for rendering.

Solution

  • A year after, the situation is getting even more confusing about how MediaWiki sites could process maths. If we all agree that texvc and maths formula displayed in png images are ugly and obsolete, it seems that Mathoid, according to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Math, "is the most recommended option; Mathoid is the rendering mode that will be used on Wikipedia in the future.” .

    But Mathoid requires an external server like Parsoid and they both (Mathoid and Parsoid) are in an heavy development. Therefore I looked for an other solution and found and tested successfully 'SimpleMathJax' (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleMathJax). It can be set like below

    wfLoadExtension( 'SimpleMathJax' );

// MediaWiki 1.24 or earlier
// require_once "$IP/extensions/SimpleMathJax/SimpleMathJax.php";

    works on any recent version of MediaWiki (latest version tested is mw1.28 of late December 2016).

    However the code of the extension itself is not distributed with the numerous MediaWiki extensions from the WikiMedia fundation (which supports mathoid) but you can get it on github at https://github.com/jmnote/SimpleMathJax/archive/master.zip and expand it into your extension subdirectory with other extensions.

    • The math rendering is beautiful because it uses MathJax and MathJax (.org) is "an open-source JavaScript display engine for LaTeX, MathML, and AsciiMath notation that works in all modern browsers."
    • Most of the standard AMS LaTeX code seems to work fine (align etc).

    It is called "simple" MathJax probably because it doesn't have the ambition of the MW MathJax extension to process all LaTeX and TeX facilities like numbering equations and process TeX macros, but it uses the original javascript CDN of mathjax.org and therefore is very simple to install and to use for short mathematical texts. - If you want to process longer and even huge mathematical texts, you can try 'pandoc' which will transform your full LaTeX document into mediawiki source with the following command line:

    $ pandoc -o foo.wiki -f latex -t mediawiki foo.tex