[Boost-docs] More equation woes.....

Subject: [Boost-docs] More equation woes.....
From: John Maddock (boost.regex_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-02-02 11:19:12

Some more experimentation reveals that:

* IE9 will only support the MathJax scripts if the script is loaded from a 
subdirectory of the one containing the HTML (a non-starter) otherwise you 
get a security warning (which I missed the first time), and if you either 
miss the warning or just follow IE9's advice and block the script then all 
the equations disappear :-(
* I tried using SVG's instead of MathML or Tex, and Oh dear that's as bad 
:-(
Yes IE9 supports SVG's, but in order for a graceful fallback be provided for 
earlier IE users you have to use <object> tags - that's OK that's what the 
Docbook stylesheets generate - except IE9 (and only IE9) won't then display 
either the SVG or the fallback image unless the image has explicit width and 
height attributes.  If that's not bad enough, IE and all the other browsers 
handle the width and height attributes differently.   I'm mean seriously 
what the &&^%$$ does MS think it's doing here?  Anyhow, I simply can't find 
a magic combination of factors that works on all the browsers... possibly 
removing the width/height attributes from the SVG and adding them to the 
HTML only would work (just checked it does work - but content gets blocked 
by default, and breaks PDF generation, besides how do you know what 
attributes to use once they're gone from the SVG?  Two sets of SVG's 
maybe?????), having the attributes on both just totally screws up the IE 
display BTW.   Likewise using <embed> doesn't help at all.

Sorry for the rant, but really, there's no way this should be this hard!

Anyhow, if anyone wants to play, I've committed an equation test page to the 
test project under doc/test.  Just don't use IE.

Still looking for ideas yours, John.