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@christianp and other #mathstodon folks, is there any ongoing work in getting LaTeX (or any #math notation) supported across all #Mastodon instances (and perhaps across all of Fediverse)? Is there a github issue I can monitor?

It's very annoying that for posts like this 👇, I have to go read it on the original site:

#Mastodon #math #mathstodon @Christian Lawson-Perfect
in reply to nilesh

Jeremy Kun
mastodon - Link to source
Jeremy Kun
• •
seems unlikely to force other instances to support it, more likely to happen via a browser extension
in reply to Jeremy Kun

Johns
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Johns
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@j2kun Why not? I see it as adapting the instance to another language, and we all know math is the universal language.
Mind you, I probably will never use it, but I'll never post in Cyrillic or Hiragana either.
@Jeremy Kun
in reply to Johns

Jeremy Kun
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Jeremy Kun
• •
@Johns_priv because today supporting latex rendering requires the server to send additional data to the client, which adds to bandwidth costs for the instance maintainer. Browsers/phones support Unicode (hence all languages) natively, which makes foreign language support free.
@Johns
in reply to Jeremy Kun

Johns
mastodon - Link to source
Johns
• •

@j2kun That's a good point and I honestly didn't thought about it.
Looking into it I saw unicode does have math symbols (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathem…) so "all we need" is a system to transform Latex into that (ha!)

My programming is rusty as fuck but this does sound like an interesting project :)

@Jeremy Kun
in reply to Johns

Jeremy Kun
mastodon - Link to source
Jeremy Kun
• •
@Johns_priv there are native options, but they require a lot more work for the author to write the equations. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…
@Johns
in reply to Jeremy Kun

nilesh
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nilesh
• •

@j2kun @Johns_priv TBH, I wasn't thinking of it as "forcing" other instances. More like helping achieve an interoperable standard across #Fediverse.

Everyone deserves to be able to read and write math.

There indeed is #FEP_dc88 #FEP ("Fediverse Enhancement Proposal") about this: codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src…

#fediverse #FEP #fep_dc88 @Jeremy Kun @Johns
in reply to nilesh

Sami Määttä
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Sami Määttä
• •

Looked around a bit and found this issue on Mastodon's Github: github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i….

Though in 2017 Eugen decreed that need for math writing and rendering isn't as widespread that it should be implemented for all users (in this closed issue): github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i….

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Christian Lawson-Perfect
mastodon - Link to source
Christian Lawson-Perfect
• •

there's a pull request by @pounce which makes the mastodon sanitizer allow MathML; that'd be a necessary step for federating mathematical notation.
github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i…
Then instances like this one which wanted to allow writing LaTeX would convert it to MathML, which all browsers can now render without any extensions.

To have this merged in, the core mastodon devs would have to spend a fair bit of time looking very closely at the security implications - edge cases in the sanitizer have been responsible for some of the most serious critical vulnerabilities in mastodon, so I don't think they have much appetite for messing with it.

@pounce
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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