[Building Sakai] Skin Selector in Test and Quizzes

Fri Jun 7 11:09:21 PDT 2013

For those who are or thinking of using MathJax, is there a particular reason why you think this is better than preserving math as images?

We were thinking about getting this started this summer on supporting math equations, and was talking with our developers about MathJax but I didn't know about fMath plugin possibility. I was planning to do some investigation into advantages and disadvantages of each (including user experience), but if anyone has any thoughts I'd appreciate hearing them.

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip Contractor McCullick, GDIT" <pcmccull at nps.edu>
To: "Paul Lukasewych" <plukasew at uwo.ca>
Cc: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
Sent: Monday, June 3, 2013 9:18:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Skin Selector in Test and Quizzes

We limited it to the Test & Quizzes because we had scripts that instructors could add for other pages. The Test & Quizzes was stripping out our scripts from the instructor input boxes. We preferred added the scripts to only the pages that needed it, because the MathJax processing is fairly heavy and was rarely needed. 

Thanks, 

Phil 

___________________________________ 

Philip McCullick, Media Development Manager 

General Dynamics Information Technology 

Supporting the Center for Educational Design, Development, and Distribution (CED3) 

Naval Postgraduate School 

(831) 656-2443 

Description: Description: Description: CED3_Logo_Master_eMail

From: Paul Lukasewych [mailto:plukasew at uwo.ca] 
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 8:43 AM 
To: McCullick, Philip Contractor, GDIT 
Cc: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org 
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Skin Selector in Test and Quizzes 

Thanks Phil, this should be helpful. Is there a particular reason why you limited it to just Tests & Quizzes? I can see Mathjax being useful in other tools as well. 

Paul Lukasewych 

Applications Development Team 

Information Technology Services 

Support Services Building 

Western University 

(519) 661-2111 x80513 

plukasew at uwo.ca 

On June 3, 2013 15:29:12 McCullick, Philip Contractor, GDIT wrote: 

Hi Paul, 

For the math skin, we used the portal.xslt file to include MathJax only on the Tests & Quizzes pages. The Sakai headscripts.js makes an optional call to postIframeResize() if the method exists in the parent. So we used that callback to put the MathJax script into the quiz iframe each time it loads a page. It does have to scan the entire page for Latex tokens, so only classes that use a lot of complex Math use this skin. 

The area we changed in the portal.xslt is inside of 

<xsl:template name="tool"> 

… 

<div class="portletMainWrap"> 

<xsl:choose> 

… 

</ xsl:choose> 

The following xslt/JavaScript code was put here. 

Here is the code we added: 

<!— Check for the Test & Quizzes tool --> 

<xsl:if test="contains($tool/toolHelp, 'samigo')"> 

<!— Add a hidden input for the mainframe's id so scripts can point at it --> 

<input type="hidden" id="mainFrameId"> 

<xsl:attribute name="value"> 

<xsl:value-of select="$tool/escapedId"/> 

</xsl:attribute> 

</input> 

<script type="text/javascript"> 

// <![CDATA[ 

var mainFrameID = document.getElementById("mainFrameId").value; 

var mathJaxLocation = "/library/js"; 

//headscripts.js calls the postIframeResize method after resizing finishes 

function postIframeResize() { 

var script = document.getElementById(mainFrameID).contentWindow.document.createElement("script"); 

script.type = "text/javascript"; 

script.src = mathJaxLocation + "/MathJax/MathJax.js?config=default"; // use the location of your MathJax folder 

var config = 'MathJax.Hub.Startup.onload();'; 

if (window.opera) { 

script.innerHTML = config; 

} else { 

script.text = config; 

} 

document.getElementById(mainFrameID).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script); 

} 

//]]> 

</script> 

</xsl:if> 

Hope that helps, 

Phil 

___________________________________ 

Philip McCullick, Media Development Manager 

General Dynamics Information Technology 

Supporting the Center for Educational Design, Development, and Distribution (CED3) 

Naval Postgraduate School 

(831) 656-2443 

From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [ mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org ] On Behalf Of Paul Lukasewych 
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2013 7:45 AM 
To: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org ; Help Desk 
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Skin Selector in Test and Quizzes 

I'm interested in the NPS Mathjax solution, so if anyone from NPS can provide more details that would be great. 

Paul Lukasewych 

Applications Development Team 

Information Technology Services 

Support Services Building 

Western University 

(519) 661-2111 x80513 

plukasew at uwo.ca 

On May 31, 2013 10:32:51 Matthew Jones wrote: 

In 2.9 (or 2.8 if you enable manually add it to CKEditor and upgrade textarea) there is support for for the fMath plugin (SAK-23266) which allows a user to import a latex file or latex plain text. This would probably be the easiest for instructors. 

And I agree with Steve, most likely that specific local skin does something special to load up mathjax only for those sites that manually enable it. We didn't ever add Mathjax system wide because by default it has to either parse everything (which slows down the browsing experience) or has to parse specific div classes (which instructors wouldn't know about and nobody ever wrote a WYSIWYG editor plugin for). 

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Steve Swinsburg < steve.swinsburg at gmail.com > wrote: 

Hi Paul, 

The Skin selector tool is here: 

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/edia/skin-manager/ 

Though I dont think you need that for what you want, that document is specific to NPS and presumably the naval_math skin has the config for the math editor. So what you really want is to install the math editor. 

cheers, 

Steve 

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:49 PM, Paul Wando Mungai < paulwando at gmail.com > wrote: 

Hi All, 

We are trying to incorporate the Skin Selector into the Tests and Quizzes so that users can use Latex Math equations. We found this document that outlines the steps to accomplish this: 

http://faculty.nps.edu/dl/tools/math_tool/MathTool_tutorial.pdf 

However, we cannot find the tool source code, or configuration steps for this. 

-- 
Regards, 
Paul Mungai 

"Ability is what youre capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it" By Lou Holtz, Notre Dame Football Coach 

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