MathML + SVG / (More) Coding and Crosshatch

Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week, we coded the bulk of our equations in our MathML track (although we do fully expect to uncover a few in the DocGen portion of our program)! We celebrate this milestone with a video short, “Coding in Amaya” -


How our computer screens look at #rdcHQ this Summer! … (Video by Nate)

… and work continues in the SVG Track. We are steadily completing work in our remaining groups. Shown here are Flowing Well In An Enclosure and Beam Pumping Well With Cellar and Typical Wellhead Equipment, Nos. 1100 and 1101, respectively.


More announcements soon – including the development of our first ever Fall Track … Never a dull moment at #rdcHQ!

#rdcHQ Mid-Program SVG and MathML Update

Last week at #rdcHQ, the crew kicked production into high gear in both the SVG and MathML tracks. We now have 232 graphics completed in the SVG track and 237 equations nearly completed in the MathML Track (half of the equations still need to be converted). This tally does not include the new work being done in DocGen, which will be our primary focus in the MathML/DocGen Track for the remainder of the program. Although our program ends at the close of the summer, we call this our “Mid-Program Status Report” as we always allow for one month of post-production after our annual launch party and art show.

Status: SVG Track

The following list shows the groupings that were created for the graphics in the CCR set. These groupings provide the framework for our lesson plan for the 2012 summer program. We also have two catch-all categories that we will explore this week: 1) images that are eligible for work with the auto-trace function and 2) that are illegible and will require research to see if better original art is available.

SVG Track – Groupings for CCR
Group 1 – Basic Lines – 21 Content Objects – COMPLETED
Group 2 – Crosshatch – 27 Content Objects -COMPLETED
Group 3 – Diagrams I – 44 Content Objects -COMPLETED
Group 4 – Diagrams II – 50 Content Objects – COMPLETED
Group 5 – Diagrams III – 42 Content Objects – In Progress
Group 6 – Landscape – 22 Content Objects – In Progress
Group 7 – Blends – 21 Content Objects – In Progress
Group 8 – Perspective – 21 Content Objects – In Progress
Group 9 – Textures – 12 Content Objects – To Do
Group 10 – Charts – 25 Content Objects – To Do
Group 11 – Labels – 17 Content Objects – In Progress
Group 12 – Flow Charts – 16 Content Objects – In Progress
Group 13 – Maps – 79 Content Objects – In Progress

Status: MathML Track

The MathML Track is divided into four groupings for our coding meetups, and we currently have 3 of the 4 groups coded, and we will be running these through QA this week. The MathML Mixed category is a tricky one as several of the equations have been flagged for straight HTML markup. There are also often several equations within a single content object, so the true number of equations has yet to be determined. We are sorting through all of these matters at #rdcHQ!

MathML Track – Groupings for CCR
Group 1 – MathML Simple – 50 Content Objects -COMPLETED and CONVERTED
Group 2 – MathML Medium – 55 Content Objects – COMPLETED
Group 3 – MathML Advanced – 49 Content Objects – COMPLETED and CONVERTED
Group 4 – MathML Mixed (equations plus text) – 89 Content Objects – In Progress

This tally currently does not include the content objects in the DocGen portion of our program. All of these are currently in progress, and we will have more updates on this track in the month of August – which will be DocGen Month at #rdcHQ!

DocGen Track – Groupings for CCR
Basic Text – 270 Content Objects – Tesseract OCR Conversion
Tables – 373 Content Objects – Tesseract OCR Conversion
Forms – 1400+ Content Objects – In Progress

Go #rdcHQ Go!

#rdcHQ deBUG Days – Cobwebs Trailer Released!

The big news at #rdcHQ – the Cobwebs Trailer has been released!

Cobwebs Trailer by The Cobwebs Crew (best viewed full screen)

This was certainly no small feat as the kids had to learn to maneuver in several different software programs in order to create this trailer! And all of the content was created, composed and performed by the Cobwebs Crew – with the exception of one iMovie themed effect (the book and spinning globe at the beginning) and one piece of music at the beginning (“Fascination” by F. Marchetti – although even it was performed by the kids). Please note that the main Cobwebs theme heard throughout the video was created by the kids.

We also learned quite a bit about iMovie in the process which led to some creativity in how the rest of the episodes will be produced. We were experiencing problems where patches of our audio could not be heard. It appears that iMovie does not deal well with a lot of contextual switching between still visuals and transitions. And that problem is compounded when more than two audio tracks are added to the source video. Only when we exported the animation with the voiceovers of our narrator as a single compiled QuickTime movie and re-imported that as another movie, could we begin working with the soundtrack. Our process for the future episodes will involve the animators building individual sequences in Pencil,* importing these into iMovie, adding transitions and dubbing voiceovers … and then exporting that piece as a single movie before we compose the soundtrack.

deBUGGING iMovie

These screenshots illustrate the problem we were experiencing -

Problem: Cobwebs Trailer with several breaks in the video stills that caused interruption in subsequent audio overlays. Voiceovers were dubbed via a USB microphone directly into iMovie (green layer). Any imported musical soundtracks were inaudible in interrupted parts of the video within iMovie and on export -

Solution: Cobwebs Trailer with flattened animation and voiceover track (shown as a purple detached audio track) exported as a source movie with several subsequent pinned soundtrack overlays (green) —

The photographs we’ll use as studies for backgrounds are starting to roll in from last week’s assignment. We’ll have more news about that soon … Stay tuned!


Please note our current trailer is pre-Pencil and was strictly built in iMovie … we discovered it when we were trouble-shooting our iMovie problem. Pencil-based animations will begin appearing in Episode One – The Pearl of Power!

MathML/DocGen Track – Decoding Unicode


Illustration by F=q(E+v^B)

This week in the MathML/DocGen Track we had a breakout session working with advanced concepts around Unicode and HTML Named Entities. This session was a result of examining the output of our first CCR MathML-to-SVGMath conversion.

In order to successfully render an equation, SVGMath often requires the raw hexidecimal unicode equivalent (e.g. “∂”) of a mathematical symbol as opposed to the HTML numeric form (e.g. “∂”), the HTML named entity (e.g. “∂” or “∂”), or the symbol itself (e.g. “∂”). Although this requirement seems overly strict, it does ensure that the proper mathematical glyph is used. To date, we have been using this list of named entities and their raw hexidecimal equivalents published by the W3C. This chart is quite useful and what we consider the canonical version, but limiting in many respects since it does not have a visual representation of the mathematical symbol. The official Unicode charts include the glyph, but even they have to be cross-referenced against other materials in the process of coding equations. And often semantics become an issue with multiple named entities for a single glyph and full descriptions that aren’t necessarily easy to visually parse.

Case in point: How many can visualize off the top of their head what a “LEFT BARB DOWN RIGHT BARB DOWN HARPOON” looks like without a cheat sheet?

We have to admit, that particular glyph was not in any of the MathML Equations we coded this week, but it makes for a fun example!

Fortunately there are other folks like us interested in the same problem. Tom Whitaker’s Unicode Chart is very well done and broken up into groupings based on the Unicode ranges. We were really jazzed to find networkerror’s Full UTF-8 Character Map which enables you to search on any character and get all of the necessary Unicode information. You can also call up a Unicode range or walk through blocks of the character map to browse for any symbol you may need.

We liked this solution so much we decided to make our own chart based on the W3C’s list that couples the named entities with the glyphs to make searching for Mathematical Operators a breeze with the Full UTF-8 Character Map. We will file this away in the rdcHQ UI Lab for future development.

In closing: We’re running QA on our converted equations and focusing on the Advanced and Mixed Equations this week … Stay Tuned!

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