Display \text content in page font instead of math font

[caseywstark]

See http://groups.google.com/group/mathjax-users/browse_thread/thread/74446172390fe049

nageh wants to know if we will support adding an option to display content in \text blocks with the page's font instead of the normal math font inside MathJax blocks. I don't know if this is possible, but here are some use cases that make sense to me:

f(x) = \begin{cases}
1 & \text{if } x \text{ is prime},
0 & \text{if } x \text{ otherwise}. \end{cases}

\mathit{COMPOSITE} = {x\in\mathbb N:x=pq \text{ for integers } p, q >
1 }

Just an aesthetics issue, but it seems to fit in with our future plans to support other fonts and such. I would say it's low-priority until after 1.1.

[nageh]

Followup comment. I think it would also be nice if \mbox and \text could be separately configured. Currently, they are treated the same. Just something for consideration.

[fred-wang]

On which branch is the fix available?

I'm trying to write a test with

<div style="font-family: ...">
  <math><mtext>sometext</mtext></math>
</div>

using different font-family, but I don't get the same effect as if I were testing only

<div style="font-family: ...">
  sometext
</div>

I get font-size change, but that already happens without the fix.

[dpvc]

It's in the v2.0-candidate branch, but you also have to set the mtextFontInherit flag to true in the "HTML-CSS" section of the configuration, otherwise the current behavior of using the TeX fonts will be used.

Davide

[fred-wang]

I've prepared != reftests for this in
Configuration/HTML-CSS/mtextFontInherit/

==> In testsuite

[fred-wang]

http://devel.mathjax.org/testing/testsuite/Configuration/HTML-CSS/mtextFontInherit/

[fred-wang]

The tests fail with the SVG output.

[dpvc]

You need to add

gConfigObject["SVG"].mtextFontInherit = true;

or maybe

gConfigObject["SVG"] = {mtextFontInherit: true};

as well, as the tests only include configuration for the HTML-CSS output at the moment.

Davide

[fred-wang]

OK, seems to work better like this ;-)

[dpvc]

Great!

[nageh]

Hm, this option is not available for the NativeMML renderer. Do you think you could support this? Thanks!

[dpvc]

@nageh: MathJax does no actually know the font in use, and the way it makes mtext use that font is to NOT assign its own font to those elements. So it does that passively, not actively. In order to make the mtext elements in NativeMML output be in the page font, it would have to know that font and force that font to be used. Since it doesn't know that font, it can't do that. It might be possible to use something like getComputedStyle to look it up, but I haven't checked into the browser coverage for that recently to see if it is feasible.

On the other hand, you could use CSS to style mtext elements with the font you are using on the page yourself.

[nageh]

Using CSS is certainly fine for most practical cases. If it's difficult to implement this I'll got that route. Thanks!!