Getting math into the blog

MultiMarkdown

Since I am using ikiwiki for my blog I got happy to read about Math Syntax when reading the MultiMarkdown Syntax Guide. This would let me write

<< e=mc^2 >>

when I wanted to render

The implementation of MultiMarkdown in ikiwiki did not support this syntax and could have been the end of the happiness.

mathml directive for ikiwiki

Since Text::ASCIIMathML have been used for the Math Syntax and ikiwiki supports writing your own plugins I got the idea to write my own mathml directive.

This directive renders a ASCIIMathML formula into MathML. There is just one argument code and it is passed to Text::ASCIIMathML to get the MathML output.

Examples

Input

[[!mathml  code="x^2"]]

Output

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mstyle><msup><mi>x</mi><mn>2</mn></msup></mstyle></math>

Rendered result

[[!mathml  code="a^2+b^2=c^2"]]

[[!mathml  code="
sigma(A) =
[(sigma(a_(11)),...,sigma(a_(1n))),
 (,...,),
 (sigma(a_(m1)),...,sigma(a_(mn)))]
"]]

Get the source

If you want the source as of today it is available in mathml.pm. I also have a Git repository at http://gustaf.thorslund.org/src/ikiwiki.git with a branch named mathml. If you are into using Git you might as well check out the ikiwiki source and after running the gitremotes script checkout the branch GustafThorslund/mathml.

Known issues

I am currently running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) with ikiwiki rebuilt from the Lucid Lynx (10.04) source for my blog. With this setup I have to disable scrubbing of the generated html. On my laptop running Lucid Lynx it works fine without disabling scrubbing. Since this is just a blog and directives are not allowed in comments anyway I can live with scrubbing being turned off.

Of the browsers I have triend the output looks good in:

• Firefox

While it looks bad in:

• Konqueror
• Chrome

Some answer to getting better support might be in Supporting MathML. Since Math Syntax did not look any good in Konqueror or Chrome the hope on getting it any better might be limited.

Update 1

1. I had to turn off scrubbing on my Lucid Lynx laptop too. I just had confused myself enough to not realize it.
2. I have patched htmlscrubber.pm to not scrub away my MathML output and enabled scrubbing again.