Firefox OS - MathML in EPUB
Published on December 18, 2013.
This is a review of the Firefox OS EPUB readers app MathML support. For testing I used A First Course in Linear by Robert A. Beezer from IDPF epub-sample repository.
Current there is two EPUB readers app in Firefox Marketplace: EPUBReader and Ab FB2 reader. The Ab FB2 reader won’t be able to load the file.
When open the file it show the cover.
Moving to the second chapter we find the presence of some MathML elements.
The subscripts and superscripts look nice for me but there are some gray box representing some element that can’t be display.
Some pages next, we find more MathML elements.
The equations in the page at the middle look nice but we have a overflow in the page at the right.
The picture below is a example of what can happen with equations when we increase the font size, it overflow the page size.
Conclusion
The EPUBReader for Firefox OS is one of the few apps that support MathML and most of the time display it nice. Long equations is the biggest problem at the moment.
Update in 24/12/2013 based on Frédéric Wang’s comment: The problems with font are cover in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775060 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693968. And the linebreaking is cover in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=534962.
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