MSQuill

This repository holds MathSpace's private fork of MathQuill.

To submit upstream pull requests, use our public fork.

Building

MathQuill's source code requires compilation before it may be consumed by a browser. MathQuill uses make (🤷) to orchestrate this compilation.

To build the default MathQuill bundle, run:

$ make clean
$ make

This will output CSS and JS files in the /build/ directory suitable for direct consumption by a web browser.

To build in watch mode:

$ make clean
$ make server

After launching the server, it is possible to try the code you've built by opening: http://localhost:9292/test/demo.html.

Debugging for Mathspace NWE (React based applications)

In order to debug the React app, both the build server and react webpack server need to be running concurrently.

Debugging for Mathspace

You may also wish to test MathQuill with Mathspace specific configuration and styles. It is possible to do this by launching:

$ make clean
$ make server

and opening http://localhost:9292/jsmvc/math_components/latex_editor/latex_editor.html

N.B. This was made possible by cloning a very old snapshot of some CanJS code from our Mathspace repository. It will not accurately reflect the current Mathspace experience.

N.B. ❗ [@ajhyndman] There is presently a race condition in module loading. I believe it is currently possible for mathquill.js to load and execute before jQuery is available. In practice, this means that sometimes you may need several refreshes before MathQuill runs correctly.

Publishing a new release

Our core Mathspace application pulls its MathQuill dependency directly from Github. This means that compiled code must be committed in each release.

To publish a new release:

1. Build a CommonJS module ready for consumption by Webpack

$ make clean
$ make mathspace

2. Merge latest code into master
3. Create a new release tag (requires repository admin access)

• Install np, if not already available.

$ npm install --global np

• Run np and follow the prompts.

$ np

Customisations

Ideally, any customisations to MathQuill should be encapsulated in one of the following folders:

• src/commands/mathspace/
• src/css/mathspace/

This is intended to make upstream change merging easier.

Regenerating the fonts

The source version of Symbola (contains all ~7800 characters) can be found on Fonts2U:

https://fonts2u.com/symbola.font

To reduce payload size and optimise browser rendering, we have run Symbola through FontSquirrel's webfont generator with the following character set selected:

Updating to latest upstream master

Unfortunately, we haven't done a very good job, historically, of segregating our Mathspace customisations from core code. This means that there isn't a very good story for merging upstream changes into our codebase.

Note from @ajhyndman: The most promising solution I can imagine is to use git to attempt to rebase all msquill repository changes written by Mathspace devs on top of upstream master. This will involve a lot of clever merge conflict resolution!

As of 09-05-2018, the most recent upgrade attempt can be found here: https://trello.com/c/JrJz3DLI/20-upgrade-mathquill.

Known issues

• Configuration options are not delegated to child \editable{} fields.
  • https://trello.com/c/MtTzCZhP
• Pressing backspace in \text{} expressions will not allow you to delete the \text node.
  • https://trello.com/c/98EnpoqK