Mathematics tools

Sorry I have not been more active but here in Anchorage it is the end of the quarter for a college I teach at, beginning of the semester at another college I teach at and the start of the tear for the local public school district for some of whose teachers I provide Moodle services... and it has been a bit hectic ;=}

I am glad things are working! If you are using the fallback code that I have posted then yes there are some things that need to be fixed and I am going to have to work with Mauno to make sure I understand what may have happened to your usage.

Yes, asciimath is wonderful and I encourage you, based on the sentiments you have expressed here to VOTE to include asciimath as a core Moodle 2 technology and a complement to DragMath. See this forum link for details!
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=102954&parent=455471

Firefox is SOOOOO simple because the fonts can easily be installed and you need nothing additional to do SVG but d.svg installed in the same directory. Additionally, if you have looked about you have noted that asciimath comes with a calculator and you can use that as a source to actually construct lots o stuff (one example is EqEd, the asciimathml equation editor, which is included with xinha in Mauno dropin xinharepla replacement for htmlarea (plug, plug, plug)

However, because not everyone is using firefox (yet) I think it important that Moodle users have a simple solution that includes fallback when the browser is unable to do the MathML, for whatever reason. Its for that reason I am trying to find the time to finish the fiddling I am doing with David Lippman's fallback script so that a) users only get one warning per session, b) the warning simply indicates what needs to be installed (if the browser will support MathML/SVG with incremental installs) and advises that asciimathml will fall back to using mimetex or mathtran c) and admins have adequate details so that they can install via theme so as to avoid conflicts in other modules and speed processing s well as point the fallback at an appropriate mimetex or mathtran server.

Frankly, I am disappointed that Moodle .org does not use it for Moodle (you can post a tracker request to that end)

In any event, while some of the asciimath code can be quite confusing, you will see if you look that you can change the delimiter tokens (your versin should use <amath>...</endamath>, <agraph> and <endagraph>, as well as <`>...<`> and <$>...<$> (I am using "<" and ">" for illustration purposes only, asciimathml does not use this style of xml tag) the /$ not the same as /$/$ (the former used to tell asciimath to parse tex, the latter being ignored by asciimath) . SO, you can fiddle about with tokens and the symbol tables and just generally have a ball.

Hi, I came accross this thread while geting ready to write something about asciisvg and internet explorer.

Anyway it got me thinking- mainly because like you I can't force my students to use Firefox. Yes IE is not great but it shouldn't be that bad. So having a closer look at that equation.

\begin{graph} xmin=-6.3; xmax=6.3; xscl=1; plot(x*sin(1/x),null,null,1000); width=200; height=200; border=25; xmin=-1; xmax=6; xscl=1; ymin=-1; plot(sin(x)+2.5); a = [0,0]; b = [5,5]; marker = "dot"; line(a,b); text(b,"b",aboveleft) ; stroke = "red"; path([a,[0,5],b,[5,0]]) ; stroke = "green"; marker = "none"; curve([a,[.25,0],[.5,.5],[1,1],[1.5,1.5]]) ; stroke = "blue"; circle([5,0],1); ellipse([0,5],1,2); stroke = "purple"; rect([0,0],[2,2],null,.5,1) ; marker = "arrowdot"; line(a,[5,0]);\end{graph}

I got that pop up error in IE but it still drew a graph. When compared to firefox's version they were exactly the same. But then I realised that neither had drawn the first plot.

So is IE just being more correct by notifying that there is a problem where FF just ignores it and moves on.

Anyway I believe that this graph statement should not have two versions of xmax and xmin, and I would think it is at least best practise to define the graph area before plotting anything. If you take out the first set as they are over-riddent by the second set, and move the first plot statement so it is after the scale statements i.e.

\begin{graph} width=200; height=200; border=25; xmin=-1; xmax=6; xscl=1; ymin=-1; plot(x*sin(1/x),null,null,1000); plot(sin(x)+2.5); a = [0,0]; b = [5,5]; marker = "dot"; line(a,b); text(b,"b",aboveleft) ; stroke = "red"; path([a,[0,5],b,[5,0]]) ; stroke = "green"; marker = "none"; curve([a,[.25,0],[.5,.5],[1,1],[1.5,1.5]]) ; stroke = "blue"; circle([5,0],1); ellipse([0,5],1,2); stroke = "purple"; rect([0,0],[2,2],null,.5,1) ; marker = "arrowdot"; line(a,[5,0]);\end{graph}

it now works in both IE and firefox. (although it did take about 40 seconds more to load in IE than firefox.

regards
Shaun

ps - I too think asciimathml is a great little script. Been using it since moodle1.5. What I was going to write about was the difficulty I have in getting graphs to display at all from moodle to IE. Way back then it was a small bug in asciimathml if I remember. Anyway I upgrading to 1.9 and again could not get graphs to show in IE. I have finally got it to work but I had to actually set the full path to d.svg in asciimathml and voila graphs now work correctly. (don't reply to this problem here as I will now go back and start a new thread about it)