Extension for siunitx

[Manishearth]

siunitx is a package that is rather common in physics papers. Could this be added?

(It was proposed here, making it into a formal feature request)

[pkra]

Just some general remarks. I'm not familiar with this extension, but from a quick glance (at the 98 page manual...), there doesn't seem anything fundamentally difficult about it, e.g. no picture environments (well, ignoring the Text-macros anyway).

So if I didn't miss anything, the answer is "yes, it could", but it's not in our backlog (well, ok it is now).

Instead of waiting for our backlog to clear, we would be very happy to help somebody else write an extension. At least for the basic set of siunitx commands, this shouldn't be too hard (except for a very good knowledge of the sinuitx).

[burnpanck]

I have started to give such an extension a try, available in my fork. However, except for being eager to learn, I am in a particularly bad position to do this, as I:

• Am just a casual JS coder
• Do not know the internals of MathJax's at all
• Do not know much about MathML
• Am a casual user of siunitx
• Do not know the internals of siunitx
• Am somewhat proficient in LaTeX, but reading package internals is tough anyway

Therefore, I'll probably need your input on various fronts.
So far I have very basic parsing of the two commands \si and \SI.
Now, here are my first two questions:

• How do I pack MathJax?
• What is the proper element in MathML/Jax to describe a unit?

[davidcarlisle]

On 14 September 2014 15:23, Yves Delley notifications@github.com wrote:

• What is the proper element in MathML/Jax to describe a unit?

mi mostly, we (Math WG) have a note on this subject:

http://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-units/

[burnpanck]

Thanks for the pointer!

[pkra]

@burnpanck first off: thanks for getting involved -- awesome! I think your self-description sounds very good actually -- perfect mix of "no baggage" ;-), so to speak.

For your first question, I would suggest to make use of the MathJax third party extension repository. That way, you can pack whichever way you like (we use our dev-tools but we have no preference) and you can push this along in the current state while having it on the MathJax CDN for a wider audience. (I would also post to relevant user group postings to recruit testers).

[pkra]

There might also be users on physics.SE that are willing to help -- to repeat the link from the OP: http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4220/siunitx-latex-package

[davidcarlisle]

On 15 September 2014 21:00, Peter Krautzberger notifications@github.com
wrote:

There might also be users on physics.SE that are willing to help -- to
repeat the link from the OP:
http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4220/siunitx-latex-package

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#447 (comment).

Joseph (siunitx's author) just made a blog post where MathJax gets a
mention....

http://www.texdev.net/2014/09/18/reworking-and-exposing-siunitx-internals/

[burnpanck]

Which might be very well be due to the fact that I told him by eMail about my endeavour, while asking about some internals of the package :-)

[burnpanck]

@pkra: I have now switched over to the third-party extension repo. However, now testing just got harder: Is there an easy way to load MathJax from a standard location, but tell it to look for third-party extensions somewhere else?

[pkra]

@burnpanck

Which might be very well be due to the fact that I told him by eMail about my endeavour, while asking about some internals of the package :-)

awesome!

Is there an easy way to load MathJax from a standard location, but tell it to look for third-party extensions somewhere else?

Yes, there is -- see http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/options/ThirdParty.html

[burnpanck]

Development on my siunitx plugin has stalled.
Just wanted to post a link to the current status:
https://github.com/burnpanck/MathJax-third-party-extensions/tree/add-siunitx-tex-extension
Somehow, I never posted that link after I switched to MathJax-third-party-extensions.

I should add that it provides usable visible output for almost all test-cases found in the siunitx documentation. What currently still doesn't work correctly is

• lists of physical quantities (unit is not properly repeated)
• rendering of angles
• literal unit input is sometimes parsed incorrectly.
• the \sisetup{...} command
• maybe a few other small issues

Furthermore, I am not sure if the generated MathML is semantically correct.

If you want to judge for yourself, go to
http://rawgit.com/burnpanck/MathJax-third-party-extensions/add-siunitx-tex-extension/siunitx/sample-siunitx.html

[pkra]

Thanks, @burnpanck, for your work on this!

If it isn't broken (just incomplete), it would be perfectly ok from our point of view to merge your work into the third party extension repo.

Do you have any suggestions for those who want to contribute to your work?

[burnpanck]

My procedure used to be to look at the examples and fix features on a one-by-one basis.
There are still a few broken (i.e. wrong output) cases, those should at least be made to fail with an error message instead. Also, error handling might not be user friendly in that it results in JS exceptions.

Since this is a relatively complex extension, I'd say a nice step forward would be the incorporation of an automated test procedure, e.g. MathJax-test. In particular since there are many options and corner cases that can easily be overlooked.

Finally, it would be good to inspect the generated MathML for typographical and semantical correctness.