Readit News> If you have the option to consider server-side equation rendering, your users may thank you.
I'm developing KeenWrite[0], a desktop-based text editor that provides real-time rendering of TeX. It has two TeX-related HTML export formats: SVG (no rendering for either client or server) or TeX (requires client-side rendering). Behind the scenes it uses a highly-optimized version of JMathTeX[1] that includes a custom renderer to handle translating math font glyphs into SVG paths.
I hooked up something similar when I was writing "julia as a cli calculator" [1], but it uses real TeX behind the scene, which gives me the opportunity to utilize existing TeX ecosystem such as TikZ and typography. Accessibility can be a problem, but I think it's possible to include some hints via the title attributes with some work.
I hope to see more server-side solutions. The customizability and client-side overhead (you only need to render once on the server, possibly with caching) is not something a client-side library can achieve.
I have a tangential question related to styling (and I agree the styling for this site is wonderful).
When designing your personal/corporate website/blog, how much weight do you attribute to users whose browsers refuse to load remote fonts (by preference or otherwise)?
I ask because I've noticed recently that some websites (notably, many google sites) are unusable, because they depend on remotely-loaded icons, which are replaced with unreadably-stretched alt-text with unintended form factors.
On this blog, for example, the default preformatted-font didn't seem to be monospaced, and the result is that the "julia" name is rendered incorrectly.
All this is meant to ask, do you ever test your designs with browser-default fonts? If not/so, is this conscious? Why?
To be clear, I intend for this to be a survey, not an inquisition. I'm trying to understand this trend better.
For my own answer. At my place of work, in spite of an avowed obsession with accessibility, our designs are regularly sabotaged by browser-default fonts and poorly-rendered alt-text.
It's just a small mistake in the CSS file :) Since Julia requires a ton of Unicode characters, I'm using a different monospace type from usual, so I forgot to put the fall back `monospace` at the end of `font-family`, but it's fixed now.
The typography in this post is beautiful (as well as the content), anybody know where this comes from? Did the author do it by hand or is it something off the shelf?
Asking for a friend...
The styling is done from scratch.
For more information, see the colophon [1] and karasu [2].
My one sadness— no Safari support! Safari has gotten better with its extensions API support.. is it just the the store that’s preventing you?
[1]: https://github.com/Krasjet/wikipedia.rehash#user-content-opt...