Mailing List Archive

Brion Vibber wrote:

>Inline TeX support for math formulae is now enabled on Wikipedia in all
>languages on phase 3; please try it out and report any functional
>problems.

Has it been committed to CVS yet? I tried to get TeX support to work
on my Disinfopedia and ran into some problems.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------

On dim, 2003-01-05 at 23:51, Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> >Inline TeX support for math formulae is now enabled on Wikipedia in all
> >languages on phase 3; please try it out and report any functional
> >problems.
>
> Has it been committed to CVS yet?

Yes, it's been in CVS for about a week and a half (plus a couple more
recent tweaks).

> I tried to get TeX support to work
> on my Disinfopedia and ran into some problems.

It's a little tricky. I tried to get some of it in the docs, but I'm
kind of new to it myself...

Dependencies:
OCaml - http://caml.inria.fr/
TeX, ImageMagick (should be available with most Linux distributions)

Setup:
Under the directory that contains the PHP source files should be a
'math' subdirectory which contains the OCaml source for the texvc
support utility; run 'make' and copy the subdir (or at least the
executables) under the install dir too.

To confuse you further, you also need a 'math' and a 'tmp' directory
that are writable by the web server process; this 'math' is where
rendered PNG images are dropped, and needs to be accessible via the web.
It shouldn't harm anything for 'tmp' to be web-accessible too, but you
don't need it to be.

Config: in LocalSettings.php, you need to set these variables:
$wgMathPath = "..."; # *URL* path to 'math' dir
$wgMathDirectory = "..."; # *File* path to 'math' dir
$wgTmpDirectory = "..."; # File path to 'tmp' dir

And, um, it _should_ work. :)

Also, check if your database has a 'math' table; if you originally set
it up with an earlier version of the software, execute
maintenance/patch-math.sql to add it.

(I probably left some steps out.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion Vibber wrote:

>Yes, it's been in CVS for about a week and a half (plus a couple more
>recent tweaks).
>
> > I tried to get TeX support to work
> > on my Disinfopedia and ran into some problems.
>
>It's a little tricky. I tried to get some of it in the docs, but I'm
>kind of new to it myself...
>
>Dependencies:
>OCaml - http://caml.inria.fr/
>TeX, ImageMagick (should be available with most Linux distributions)

OK, our server is running FreeBSD, so I don't know if these are
present. Actually, TeX support is something I probably don't need, so
I think I'll hold off on this for the time being.

I noticed that the "INSTALL" file says the following:

> If you don't want tmbeddex TeX support, disable it by setting
> $wgUseTex = false;
> in LocalSettings.php

However, the $wgUseTex variable doesn't currently exist in the latest
CVS version of LocalSettings.php, and when I inserted it myself, my
version of Wikipedia still gives me errors that say "Failed to parse."

Also, I'm not sure you want the following line to appear as-is in the
CVS distribution of LocalSettings:

$wgMathPath = "http://wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org/~taw/wiki/math";
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------