Why is the math output hard to read sometimes?

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  • Thread starter squidsoft
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In summary, the font used in the forum's math output is not legible on a grey background. Changing the font to a bolder version might make it more readable.
  • #71
I've never been thrilled with inline LaTex.

EDIT: please don't get me wrong, it goes without saying that having LaTex is a great feature and Warren has done the PF community a great service in providing it to us.
 
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  • #72
Yeah, the inline LaTeX is a little tough.. I can't just use a trim command. I have to trim it exactly to some known y dimension. I'll work on it.

- Warren
 
  • #73
The typesetting worked well a few days ago, even in I.E. 6 (which is what I often use where I am). But now the typesetting on the forum does not work, so I see only blotchy black rectanges, as when I try to view this:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=319942

If something, obviously, in the forums has changed, this change is not the right kind. Maybe change it back, or change it better in a way that typesetting with TEX or LaTex will work in I.E. 6.

(unfortunately, some of us do not have the option of using a different web browser )
 
  • #74
symbolipoint,

I understand your frustration, but we need to provide the best quality of service to the largest number of people possible. IE6 was released eight years ago, has not been updated in five years, and is unsupported by Microsoft. It has always contained a widely-known bug in its handling of transparency, which affects many websites, not just ours.

There was no way (that I could find) to use the previous back-end programs to create decent looking TeX, so I changed to another back-end. I will look for some work-arounds for the IE6 bug, but I'm afraid that you really need to be using more recent software. If you are unable to install software on your own computer, please talk to your administrators and get them to upgrade to software still recognized by Microsoft.

- Warren
 
  • #75
IE 6 (and IE 5.1 for Mac)

Hi Warren! :smile:

Congratulations on your 10,001st post! :biggrin:
chroot said:
IE6 was released eight years ago, has not been updated in five years, and is unsupported by Microsoft. It has always contained a widely-known bug in its handling of transparency, which affects many websites, not just ours.
…
… please talk to your administrators and get them to upgrade to software still recognized by Microsoft.

I'm using IE 5.1 for Mac, with OS 9.1 (not my usual software), and the LaTeX looks fine.

So don't upgrade … change to a Mac … even an old one! :wink:​
 
  • #76
It seems the transparency bug in IE concerned PNG images.
There are apparently workarounds using CSS or maybe Javascript... but I'm not sure how this works for other browsers.

Could one use GIF images? (I recall there was some potential legal issues with GIF... but I assume that that has been resolved.)
 
  • #77
GIF images do not have an alpha channel -- pixels are either entirely transparent or entirely opaque. That will make the images look bad (as well as being larger, which is a major concern for us). And, of course, there's that pesky legal concern. GIF's dead, for good reason. :smile:

- Warren
 
  • #78
chroot said:
GIF images do not have an alpha channel -- pixels are either entirely transparent or entirely opaque. That will make the images look bad (as well as being larger, which is a major concern for us). And, of course, there's that pesky legal concern. GIF's dead, for good reason. :smile:

- Warren

While I personally prefer PNG, using GIF might not be as bad.Post #27 by Hans de Vries links to transparent-gif images by mathlinks (linked again here)
http://alt2.mathlinks.ro/latexrender/pictures/e/6/f/e6f7873e4868755812ca60c34dd13a22e4ea785b.gif
... which looks pretty good... and has a size of 1,706 bytes.
The current PF-png version (using the latex code in https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2233960#post2233960") has a size 1,624 bytes... which isn't that much of a savings to prefer PNG to GIF.According to wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format
The US LZW patent expired on June 20, 2003.[16] The counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on June 18, 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired on June 20, 2004 and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on July 7, 2004.[16] Consequently, while Unisys has further patents and patent applications relating to improvements to the LZW technique,[16] the GIF format may now be used freely.

...and concerning what used to be an http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#gif"
Finally for a long time the compression algorithm used by GIF was patented. Consequently it was not available for use by many image processing programs, such as ImageMagick. Thus very old IM programs will output GIF format images un-compressed, and thus using more disk space than it should. You can fix this using a GIF batch compression program such as "Gifsicle" or "InterGIF". However as the patent expired completely in mid-2004, the current release of IM has the GIF image compression re-enabled again.
 
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  • #79
chroot said:
symbolipoint,

I understand your frustration, but we need to provide the best quality of service to the largest number of people possible. IE6 was released eight years ago, has not been updated in five years, and is unsupported by Microsoft. It has always contained a widely-known bug in its handling of transparency, which affects many websites, not just ours.

There was no way (that I could find) to use the previous back-end programs to create decent looking TeX, so I changed to another back-end. I will look for some work-arounds for the IE6 bug, but I'm afraid that you really need to be using more recent software. If you are unable to install software on your own computer, please talk to your administrators and get them to upgrade to software still recognized by Microsoft.

- Warren

Well I read the forum on a computer owned by the company I work for... There is NO way the IT guys would let us change to a different version of IE. So for me, any posts with the Latex are completely illegible, useless to me...

I'm definitely not a computer geek - if there is something I can do to make the Latex legible (or even visible) please give me a clue.

Thanks
 
  • #80
gmax137 said:
Well I read the forum on a computer owned by the company I work for... There is NO way the IT guys would let us change to a different version of IE. So for me, any posts with the Latex are completely illegible, useless to me...

I'm definitely not a computer geek - if there is something I can do to make the Latex legible (or even visible) please give me a clue.

Thanks

They shouldn't let people use a 5 year old version of IE full of virus, worm, bank account
spyware and other vulnerabilities. It's the perfect way to get your company's PC's compro-
mised, turned into a zombie, get confidential data stolen, and so on... :yuck:

Regards, Hans.
 
  • #81
gmax137 said:
Well I read the forum on a computer owned by the company I work for... There is NO way the IT guys would let us change to a different version of IE. So for me, any posts with the Latex are completely illegible, useless to me...

I'm definitely not a computer geek - if there is something I can do to make the Latex legible (or even visible) please give me a clue.
Are you allowed to install another browser, in addition to Internet Explorer? I'm using Firefox myself. Most computer geeks are. It's better than IE in many ways. It used to be a lot faster too, but I don't know if it's still true. I think IE may have caught up a bit. Google Chrome looks really good too. That's definitely the fastest browser.
 
  • #82
Fredrik said:
Are you allowed to install another browser, in addition to Internet Explorer? I'm using Firefox myself. Most computer geeks are. It's better than IE in many ways. It used to be a lot faster too, but I don't know if it's still true. I think IE may have caught up a bit. Google Chrome looks really good too. That's definitely the fastest browser.

Don't forget about Opera or Safari. No real reason to use IE anymore.
 
  • #83
gmax137 said:
Well I read the forum on a computer owned by the company I work for... There is NO way the IT guys would let us change to a different version of IE. So for me, any posts with the Latex are completely illegible, useless to me...

I don't understand this at all. Why won't they even let you upgrade to a more current version of IE? I could understand them choosing not to support other browsers (though, often that doesn't mean you can't install them, just that they aren't going to help you troubleshoot them), but not even to upgrade to a reasonably current version of IE?
 
  • #84
As recommended I installed firefox, and as others note the latex equations do look very nice. The only downside I've noticed so far is that the advertisements on the screen can be seen 'through' the forum text, making the text hard to read (how hard it is depends on the details of the ad). I don't remember this being a problem in IE, at least not in this forum site.

thanks for the tip on firefox. I left IE on 'my' computer so that if I need help from my IT dept they won't be too pissed off.
 
  • #85
Is it even possible to remove IE? I thought that you can't uninstall it if you run windows...
 
  • #86
Yeah, there's no need to remove IE, just don't use it unless IT comes looking.

As for ads, now that you have Firefox, if you're not interested in viewing them, go to their add-ons and find AdBlock Plus. Poof! No more ads. :biggrin:
 
  • #87
Or, become a PF contributor and see the site ad-free. :smile:

Seriously, though, I don't know what you mean about advertisements showing through text, but it doesn't sound right. Could you take a screen capture of it for me?

- Warren
 
  • #89
dx said:
Hi chroot,

I have a similar problem with Firefox, where the ads cover the post text. I attached a screenshot in post #5 in this thread: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=304395.

sometimes happens when there is a quote in the first post of a thread

Moonbear said:
As for ads, now that you have Firefox, if you're not interested in viewing them, go to their add-ons and find AdBlock Plus. Poof! No more ads. :biggrin:

poof, no more PF :wink:
 
  • #90
btw, you are logged in, you should not see that ad in the post. It's only for guests.
 
  • #91
Greg Bernhardt said:
poof, no more PF :wink:

If they're not clicking on them anyway, does it matter? I always thought ad revenue was dependent on people clicking the ads, not just putting up with them on the page. Is that wrong?
 
  • #92
Moonbear said:
If they're not clicking on them anyway, does it matter? I always thought ad revenue was dependent on people clicking the ads, not just putting up with them on the page. Is that wrong?

Slightly, now about 20% of the time the ads are impression based rather than click.
 
  • #93
Greg Bernhardt said:
Slightly, now about 20% of the time the ads are impression based rather than click.

Oh, okay. In that case, what chroot said...become a contributor to avoid ads. :biggrin:
 
  • #94
Greg Bernhardt said:
Slightly, now about 20% of the time the ads are impression based rather than click.

How do you count Google ads? They're ostensibly based on impressions, but their pricing is asymptotically equivalent to pricing per click.
 
  • #95
CRGreathouse said:
How do you count Google ads? They're ostensibly based on impressions, but their pricing is asymptotically equivalent to pricing per click.

20% of the time it's not a google ad :wink:
 
  • #96
Greg Bernhardt said:
Slightly, now about 20% of the time the ads are impression based rather than click.
Would it be better for PF if contributors would wait until all the adds come up before logging in.

I would do that.
 
  • #97
dlgoff said:
Would it be better for PF if contributors would wait until all the adds come up before logging in.

I would do that.

Thanks for the consideration Don, but you needn't bother yourself with that. Enjoy the community :smile:
 
  • #98
All things considered, I think the LaTeX looks much better now. A few things are still weird, but it doesn't matter much. [itex]x_n\rightarrow x[/itex] is aligned wrong, and [tex]\implies[/tex] looks messed up. But [itex]f(x_n)\rightarrow f(x)[/itex] looks good, and [itex]\implies[/itex] is just aligned wrong.
 
  • #99
Yeah, I need to work on the inline alignment, I know... argh.

- Warren
 
  • #100
I have a weird TeX issue that started recently. For some reason the LaTeX shows up in a black box with faint white outlines where the text is supposed to be. Something like it has been processed with an edge detection filter. I am sure it is just some random setting that got adjusted in one of my automatic updates, but does anyone know which setting and how to turn it back?
 
  • #101
DaleSpam said:
I have a weird TeX issue that started recently. For some reason the LaTeX shows up in a black box with faint white outlines where the text is supposed to be. Something like it has been processed with an edge detection filter. I am sure it is just some random setting that got adjusted in one of my automatic updates, but does anyone know which setting and how to turn it back?

Browsing with Internet Explorer 6?
 
  • #102
Yes. But this issue just started recently and I have used IE6 for a long time (obviously).
 
  • #104
DaleSpam said:
Yes. But this issue just started recently and I have used IE6 for a long time (obviously).

DaleSpam - this is exactly what I saw and described above. My understanding is that the way PF works has been modified recently, with the upshot being that those who still use IE6 now see the LaTex as crap (actually, it is completely illegible), while others see an improvement. I took the advice offered above and installed the Firefox browser - now everything looks good for me. And the FF browser installation and use is painless. The only caveat I made during installation was to NOT select Firefox as my default browser, because I didn't want to mess anything else up (I have a lot of 'web based' applications on my work computer).
 
  • #105
Unfortunately this IE6 problem is not going to go away. Anyone browsing from home has no problem, they can install any browser they like. But if you're using someone else's computer (e.g. your employer's), in many cases you are simply not allowed to install anything else. It doesn't matter how many arguments there are in favour of upgrading, if the IT department doesn't allow it, you're stuck.
 

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