Re: [Texmacs-dev] arxiv-vanity

[TeXmacs]

Hi Max,

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:31:03AM +0100, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
> I was thinking in various directions (somewhat loosely related):
> 
> 1) Their stylesheets are very nice and in particular they are 
> ???responsive???, that is adapt to various screen sizes (like reading on the 
> phone). So we could imagine we ???steal??? their CSS to have better quality 
> HTML output in TeXmacs.

I am not sure whether it is really better.  The HTML for
my articles also displays nicely on my phone and on tables.

Afterwards, one can always argue about fonts and
presentation issues, of course.  Maybe you would prefer
a sans serif font, for instance.  In which case we again
hit the problem that there are no really good sans serif
fonts for maths.

One thing that could still be improved in the Html export
concerns equation arrays.  It is very hard to have numbers
that float to the right.  If you see a good way to achieve this,
then that would be great.

> 2) TeXmacs could be even better than their pipeline for this particular task. 
> I wonder if importing from arxiv in TeXmacs and then converting to HTML (with 
> maybe some improved styling in their direction) would give a  better result 
> than their LateXml based strategy.

That will depend on the file, but in many cases it should,
because our converters are really good now.

> 3) When we produce HTML in TeXmacs one could use the strategy of MathJax to 
> do typography in HTML/CSS, so without relying on MathML or images or MathJax. 
> Since TeXmacs already computes the positioning of the boxes we could just 
> output appropriate HTML to reproduce TeXmacs math typography. I???m quite 
> impressed by the quality of HTML output nowadays. Seems that PDF could be 
> replaced by HTML as output format.

I am not so sure.  It definitely looks better now,
but it is still far from the quality of TeX/LaTeX or TeXmacs.
And improving the last 10% in quality is extremely time consuming.

Best wishes, --Joris