[Macpartners] MathML font installer testing

[Albert Willis]

I'm sending this on behalf of Daniel Jamous of Academic Computing 
Support. If you're interested in testing the MathML font installer, 
follow the directions below. If you have any questions regarding the 
installer, please follow up with Daniel; his e-mail address is 
jamous at mit.edu.

If you run into an operating system problem or issue, feel free to ask 
the question on Mac Partners.

   -- Al

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Hello,

To those of you who are Mac users: I'm wondering whether you would be 
willing to test our new font installer for MathML. This should take 
only a few minutes. I tested it myself and found out that the installer 
works properly. However, the rendering is not improved when adding the 
fonts, on the contrary it is rather worse and I'm curious to see if 
this problem is reproducible or not. Thank you in advance and here are 
the steps (the installer should work on both Mac OS 9 and X):

1) You need Mozilla 1.1 and higher or Netscape 7.1 to conduct this 
test. If you don't already have any of these, download either one at:

Mozilla:
http://www.mozilla.org

Netscape 7.1:
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp

2) go to:
http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/pmathml2.xml
to view an example of a MathML page and the square root rendering 
problem without the fonts. You should see a pop-up window listing 
several fonts as missing. Another good test page is the "Mozilla MathML 
torture test" at:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/demo/texvsmml.xhtml

3) download the fonts installer at:
http://web.mit.edu/atticus/www/mathml/mit-mathml-fonts-1.0-fc2a.hqx

4) quit Mozilla or Netscape and complete the fonts installation by 
following the instructions on the screen (in the current version, only 
the Mathematica fonts are included).

5) relaunch Mozilla or Netcsape and go back to the url examples above: 
what do you observe? Is the square root rendering improved? You will 
still see a window popping-up listing  fonts as missing (but not the 
math anymore) but we can live with that if the rendering is ok.

Thanks very much!

Daniel

Daniel Jamous
Faculty Liaison, Academic Computing Support

Information Systems
MIT, Room N42-040G
Cambridge, MA 02139

tel 1   : 617-252-1383
tel 2   : 617-253-0115 (faculty liaison line)
fax     : 617-253-8665
e-mail  : jamous at mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/acs