[Rd] Bundling MathJax

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2022 at 7:35 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 13/03/2022 8:47 a.m., Ivan Krylov wrote:
> > Hello R-devel,
> >
> > I appreciate the efforts devoted towards improving equation typography
> > in HTML manuals. Since MathML lost its status as the way to express
> > mathematics on the web after its removal from Google Chrome in 2013,
> > MathJax and KaTeX are probably the best options left: both TtH [1] and
> > HeVeA [2] don't render math quite as well and likely don't do anything
> > about accessibility of the resulting equations (which seems to be the
> > reason to focus on the HTML documentation in the first place).
> >
> > Having seen r81881 [3], I would like to suggest bundling MathJax
> > together with R instead of loading it from the Internet. Every now and
> > then, I work from places with spotty Internet connection (e.g. mobile
> > network on a train). If R defaults to downloading a file every time
> > Rd2HTML is called, that would be very inconvenient to me, especially
> > since the requests for external JavaScript could intermittently fail
> > or take a long time to load, resulting in partially failed renders.
> >
> > For now, R documentation can be viewed without access to external
> > resources (admittedly, not counting the use of external \figure{} and
> > other Rd macros by packages, which is rare). I think that's a major
> > strength of R and I would like to help preserve it.
> >
>
> An issue related to this was faced by the mathjaxr package:  The file
> used for display is usually a minified version of the MathJax source,
> and Debian didn't consider it close enough to source code to want to
> distribute it as FOSS.  So if the minified file is included with R, the
> original source should also be included.
>
> An alternative to this would be to provide a utility to download the
> minified file.  Users with poor connectivity could do that once and
> access the local copy thereafter.

Would this really work? Wouldn't you also need the supplementary files
such as fonts (relative to the main js file)?

-Deepayan

> Duncan Murdoch
>
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