Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics Online Edition

[Oliver Heimlich]

On 31.05.2016 14:44, Michael A. Gottlieb wrote:
> Dear Oliver,
> 
> Here are the results of yesterday's survey:
> 
> Most of my colleagues prefer "matchFontHeight: false" in the online
> edition of FLP <http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu>, However some
> prefer "matchFontHeight: true," which increases the math font size by
> 11%, making it bigger than the body text, and that does not look very
> good, as you have noted. However, I made some careful measurements and
> discovered that "matchFontHeight: false" leaves the mathematics
> somewhat /smaller/ than our (Georgia font) body text, which also does
> not look very good. So, what I've done is this: In the "HTML-CSS"
> section of Mathjax.Hub.Config I set  "matchFontHeight: false" but also
> "scale: 106" which increases the math font size by 6%. This gives a good
> match to our body text. I also edited "styles" to make the top and
> bottom margin around display equations 15% smaller (reducing them from
> 1em to .85em). And finally, in the "Tex" section of Mathjax.Hub.Config I
> changed TagIndent to 0.25em; previously it was set to 0em, which allowed
> the equation numbers to crowd wider equations on narrower displays.
> 
> I consider the overall improvement to be considerable, so thanks once
> again for bringing matchFontHeight to my attention.
> 
> Best regards,
> Mike 

Dear Mike,

sigh … the problem of incompatible font metrics.

I always try to use the same font (family and size) for maths as for
surrounding text. I also do this in LaTeX/PDF documents whenever
possible. IMHO, having a different font for mathematics is an ancient
legacy that predates Unicode and Unicode fonts and which I don't find
aesthetic. Unfortunately, it is still common to use different fonts and
it's the default in LaTeX. For example, it was a lot of work to achieve
something else with LaTeX for my thesis [1] (and if you look carefully,
the italic variables are of a different font, because I wasn't able to
typeset them in the desired font).

Maybe you have a printed copy of “Chicago Manual of Style” (16th
Edition) in your library. Look at Chapter 12 how nicely the math
examples integrate in the surrounding text when everything uses the same
font.

For web pages I find this even more important. Most/all of the MathJax
fonts are not well suited for low definition screens, which are still
very common.

See [2] for what I tried with MathJax to use the surrounding font in
math. However, the calculated margins of MathJax are obviously based on
different font metrics and some of the alignment is recognizably wrong
when I change fonts with CSS. This is solved way better by the MathML
rendering in Gecko. However, in Gecko's MathML engine I don't know how
to modify the font of italic characters. :-/

To be honest, I don't want to do all that fine-tuning to get a (IMHO)
somewhat acceptable result with MathJax. Did you file a bug report
regarding the Don'tMatchFontHeight feature?

Best regards
Oliver

[1] http://exp.ln0.de/heimlich-power-2011.pdf
[2]
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/octave-maintainers/2016-05/msg00403.html