** Using WeBWorK **

Problems where the answer involves entering answers into a matrix are done so that they have to be viewed in tth mode. Being a fan of image type modes myself, and knowing that lots of our students will have mozilla which initially does not display tth mode correctly, I am making a command to adjust its display based on the mode. It will look like

\{ showmat( [[1,'\(sin(x^3)\)',3],[ans_rule(5), 2,ans_rule(5)]]) \}

where it will take an optional argument like align=>'crlc' to indicate horizontal alignments of columns.

My questions to the list are: Are there other features people would like to see? Can you think of a better name than showmat? Does this sound generally useful?

John

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Will this work with fractions too? Is the plan to use HTML tables to align the matrix and then insert pngs or HTML elements in each cell, or do you have something else in mind?

-- Mike

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The idea is to have it expand differently depending on the mode, and in image modes, it builds a html table and stuffs the entries into the corresponding places. If the entry has math in it, WW will make images for the individual bits. If the entry has an answer blank in it, that works too.

As to fractions, it then works for fractions put inside the matrix. If you meant a fraction whose numerator and denominator were matricies, then I expect that will not work without special coding on the part of the problem writer.

John

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In someways this is a limited version of what tth is doing when turning TeX layout to HTML layout, but at the last stage you would insert the symbols as a png instead of as equations made from symbol (and other) fonts. This avoids the non-standard font problem, which is somewhere between annoying and deadly depending on which browser you are using and the degree of sophistication of the user. There are probably limits to how far one can go mixing TeX and HTML in this way, but the limits may not matter for the type of mathematics we need for calculus homework problems.

Here are some other thoughts on this problem in general:

1. The display used can be made to depend on information about the browser being used. Since browser's frequently lie about their identity this is risky at best.

2. I've had a project on the back burner to try to filter the output of tth and replace all symbols by unicode versions of the symbol. Would that help handle non-uniformity in browsers? How well do the browsers currently in use handle unicode? I'm not particularly knowledgeable about unicode, so I'd appreciate any feedback anyone can give me on this point. Is there any hope that this approach would increase the compatibility of tth with the majority of browsers?

3. Another idea for mixing tex/dvipng pictures and answer blanks would be to show the answer blank outlined within the equation, and make the png an image map. Clicking on an answer blank outline would popup another small window into which the answer could be entered. No doubt another set of compatibility problems exists in that direction, but still....

4. Along the same lines, I've also felt that it would be neat if the previewer, instead of replacing the current problem, was designed to be a second window (or a panel of the first window) which displayed the current input in typeset form when the cursor was over the input box.

I think there is a lot of room for experimentation in the display modes for WeBWorK. We tried to make the framework such that all of these display modes could coexist with choices being made by the user (at least until we've done enough experimentation to weed out some of the ideas that really don't work at all.) Even text mode has it's uses as debugging tool and in those instances where someone is using lynx or a low bandwidth PDA to do their homework.

--Mike

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