Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2019 April 22

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April 22

Use of SVG picture and equations in articles on Physics/Mathematics

Dear Sir/Madam:

Of late lots of articles have embedded pictures and equations using the SVG format. This is a deviation for past practice where articles had jpg or word encodings and were very to copy and re-read offline. SVG formatting is still esoteric and requires expensive and risky converters. In that we have to invoke the convertor each time such an equation is encountered in an article. For an article having 100s of equations such a conversion is totally impractical. Two suggestions:

1. The use of SVG is retrograde in terms of time, convenience and accessibility and in negation to the basic philosophy of Wikipedia. This inconvenience far outweighs the purported advantages of using SVG. Please revert to conventional formatting.

2. I SVG formatting is absolutely needed please include a reliable and well-tested convertor in Wikipedia dialog box that converts the entire article having SVG encoding in one go to word, PDF, jpg or other formats.

Misbah Islam, PEng, — Preceding unsigned comment added by Misbahnayyar (talk • contribs) 16:23, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Most browsers support SVG now, and its advantage is that it is smooth and scalable to arbitrary sizes. If you want pdf, look at the left side of the page where it says "Print/export" and select pdf. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 02:40, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Not really the right place for this question, better would be Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics or one of the Village Pump pages. Anyway, I think WP automatically converts SVG to PNG for more or less the issues you've mentioned. When I right-click an SVG image on a WP page and select 'View Image', the browser opens a PNG file, not the original SVG. You can view the original SVG of an image on the image's page (click on the image and then More details), and you can also find rasterized versions in various resolutions as well. SVG is convenient for people creating and modifying images, but you shouldn't be seeing the original SVG format when reading articles. How equations are displayed is controlled in the WP preferences/appearance tab; if it's not set to PNG already then you can easily change it to that. Probably for offline reading the best way is to click on 'Download as PDF' which should be somewhere under the Wikipedia logo; I just tried this myself and there was no problem with SVG's though animated GIF's stopped being animated. --RDBury (talk) 03:13, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

• @Misbahnayyar: Per WP:MATH, the older [rendering of math formulas as] PNG images can be set via user preferences. See "math" in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering.

As for making it back into the default... Well, considering that SVG has been a web standard for twenty years, I doubt it is fair to say it is "esoteric". Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 09:32, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Misbahnayyar: This was wrong. CiaPan (talk) “lots of articles have embedded pictures and equations using the SVG format” – that's not true. Files are uploaded to Commons in SVG format, but (as RDBury said above) Wikipedia displays them in PNG format. And the issue you present simply does not exist. --CiaPan (talk) 14:50, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I do not think it is about Commons images. Assuming they are talking about math formulas generated from LateX, they are in SVG format at least in certain browsers. For me, the html of Jordan curve theorem contains

<img src="https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/ea14f3fe51546c1830ecddfb7c9afbdc734f7004" class="mwe-math-fallback-image-inline" aria-hidden="true" style="vertical-align: -2.505ex; width:31.379ex; height:6.176ex;" alt="{\displaystyle {\tilde {H}}_{q}(Y)={\begin{cases}\mathbb {Z} ,\quad q=n-k{\text{ or }}n\\0,\quad {\text{otherwise}}.\end{cases}}}"/>

which links to that image which is svg. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 16:52, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Tigraan: I think you're right and I was wrong. For me the same definition displays as PNG with URL https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/png/ea14f3fe51546c1830ecddfb7c9afbdc734f7004 – but I have verified righ now that I have a preference to display math in PNG, while recommended is MathML with fallback to SVG and then PNG. I am still using PNG setting because I had some long lasting problems with fraction line in MathML and just forgot many readers use it. --CiaPan (talk) 22:18, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Misbahnayyar: I was arrogant – and I was wrong. I didn't study your problem deep enough before I answered. Please accept my apologies. --CiaPan (talk) 22:18, 24 April 2019 (UTC)