I hope you guys won't object to a question from a linguist with a tex filter question (and relative newbie status with all this!).
I am wanting to use the latex tipa package to produce phonetic fonts (especially in the answers to multichoice quizzes). It turns out that tipa does not work in maths mode (even in normal latex) - to use it in maths mode, it needs to go into mbox.
But after some searching I've discovered that mbox is a blacklisted command in Moodle. Is there any other way of getting this to work?
I really need to be able to enter the phonetics as ascii text so that it can go into the answer boxes in multichoice questions (and to allow easy import options - adding images to every quiz question is horrible!).
If there is no other way, is mbox really a serious security issue?
Help and suggestions gratefully received!
Matthew.
\mbox is not a serious security issue - it's about as dangerous as \line that can cause some unexpected results but not the same way as for example \input.
You can remove \mbox from blacklisted words from file filter/tex/lib.php ( $tex_blacklist ) if you want.
I suppose you could also use some well known unicode fonts like Arial Unicode MS in Word to add most phonetic symbols to Word and copy them from clipboard to moodle ... or for example http://ipa.typeit.org/ that lets you type some IPA symbols and paste them to your moodle... or copy symbols through clipboard from some sites like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
You can remove \mbox from blacklisted words from file filter/tex/lib.php ( $tex_blacklist ) if you want.
I suppose you could also use some well known unicode fonts like Arial Unicode MS in Word to add most phonetic symbols to Word and copy them from clipboard to moodle ... or for example http://ipa.typeit.org/ that lets you type some IPA symbols and paste them to your moodle... or copy symbols through clipboard from some sites like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
Thanks so much for the advice (and the swift reply!). I will pass on your security comment to our IT people in the hope that they will allow mbox (I´m hoping this will work well with importing questions in the GIFT format). And I will check out the unicode option too.
Thanks again, Matthew.
Thanks again, Matthew.