The Aperiodical 

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MathType and WIRIS Join Forces

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted October 3, 2017

A little bit of news for those who, through necessity or ignorance or unique personal whimsy, use a WYSIWYG editor for putting equations into computers.

WIRIS, whose technology is used in things like the virtual learning environment Blackboard, have bought Design Science, makers of MathType. MathType became the de facto standard equation editor for Microsoft Word back before its built-in solution was any good, but has somewhat stagnated recently. The press release says, “by combining our teams we will now be able to offer education, scientific and publishing communities newer products at a fast pace”. I think that’s a long way of saying they’re not going to duplicate their efforts any more.

More information: Press Release from Design Science.

via Emma Cliffe on Twitter.

Dark days for MathML support in browsers

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted November 1, 2013

For a brief moment at the start of the year, Google’s Chrome browser could render mathematical notation written in MathML. Since then, things have got worse for mathematics on the web.

In February, the MathML rendering code was removed by Google, citing concerns about security and code quality. Now, a member of the Chromium team has announced that Google will not be supporting MathML in the foreseeable future:

MathML is not something that we want at this time. We believe the needs of MathML can be sufficiently met by libraries like MathJax and doesn’t need to be more directly supported by the platform. In areas where libraries like MathJax are not good enough, we’d love to hear feedback about what APIs we would need to expose so that MathJax, et al, can create an awesome MathML implementation.

Peter Krautzberger, manager of the MathJax project, is not happy.