Wikipedia:TeX requests

Here you can discuss the Wikipedia:TeX markup for mathematical formulas, report bugs, request features etc.

sets of equations

A feature for aligning several equations underneath each other is needed. Could be done similarly to the new \begin{matrix}...\end{matrix}

• "aligning several equations" is feature of text formatting, not math markup. The same is the case with case-by-case definitions. I'm not saying they won't be supported. Just that they not really that relevant to what we are trying to solve with texvc.

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${\begin{matrix}a^{\flat }&b^{\natural }\\c^{\sharp }&d\end{matrix}}$

More correct error messages for \begin and \end. Now it it reports that it doesn't know these, but it does understand things like \begin{pmatrix}. -- Jan Hidders

texvc doesn't treat \begin and \end as functions. Problem has low priority. Taw 15:05 Jan 1, 2003 (UTC)

minor things

• since the spacing commands \!, \; and \, are supported, \> should be supported as well
  • \> is not in usual documentation (for example http://www.giss.nasa.gov/latex/ltx-118.html ), seems to be doing the same thing as \,, and is not used in any PlanetMath equation.

• \ddots needed to construct large matrices
  • Yes, \ddots is missing. One line to fix that. If you have some documentation with list of all symbols in AMS-LaTeX, please post it here, so all can be added at once.
    • http://wso.williams.edu/how/lshort2e/node61.html is a complete list.
• error messages need to be improved: the input S = \{ \frac{m}{n} \mid \mbox{$m$ is even and $n$ is odd} \} does not give a helpful error message, even though it is correct, standard and safe TeX.

Now the showstoppers:

• \big is missing; parenthesis size cannot be adjusted properly. This makes many formulas ugly, and some formulas unreadable.
  • \big nor any other function with so insane semantics will not be supported. Taw 20:45 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)
    • The semantics of \big is not any worse than \left and \right.
• the png images should have transparent background
  • Yes, transparent pngs would be nice. Does anybody know what ImageMagick magic is needed to convert black-and-white image to black-and-background one ? I didn't have much luck with that. And there's still a problem that some old browsers don't handle PNG transparency well.

Taw 21:21 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)