What's new in TeX, part 2 [LWN.net]

What's new in TeX, part 2

Posted Oct 29, 2015 2:11 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
Parent article: What's new in TeX, part 2

It's too bad you didn't try Firefox for your "typography on the Web" example. Firefox supports auto-hyphenation (if you enable it with CSS "hyphens:auto" and set lang="..." in the HTML). It also enables ligatures at all font sizes. Chrome != the Web.

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What's new in TeX, part 2

Posted Oct 29, 2015 2:21 UTC (Thu) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (2 responses)

You are absolutely correct. Also, Firefox supports MathML, which Chrome does not. Firefox and other browsers that support CSS hyphenation still, however, do not control for such things as consecutive hyphens, widows, orphans, and other things that make paragraphs look bad and hard to read. Thanks for pointing out my omission.

What's new in TeX, part 2

Posted Oct 29, 2015 7:11 UTC (Thu) by matthias (subscriber, #94967) [Link]

I seldomly see orphans and widows in the web. The reason is that there seems to be no good solution for breaking text down into columns. Looking at standard 16:9 monitors, there is easily space for 2-3 columns which would make reading much easier than those overlong lines, one often sees. Once this support is there, of course we have to avoid orphans and widows.

However, I am not sure what would be the best solution for pages that do not fit entirely on screen, even with columns. Breaking them down into smaller pages would be one option. Horizontal scrolling (to see more columns) another. Vertical scrolling probably would not work that well, as obviously a single column should not be higher than the screen.

Interestingly, for small devises like phones, the existing one "endless" column approach works much better than for bigger devices.

Limited MathML support

Posted Oct 29, 2015 7:17 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

The paucity of Web browser support for MathML is depressing. It's an ISO/IEC standard, and yet the reasons Chrome, IE, and Opera/Safari dropped support (or never supported it fully) are lame. Sigh...

Thanks for the article, Lee!