This guide describes how to view MathML-enabled sites in Mozilla Firefox

Tested for Ubuntu Feisty 7.10

Warning. Due to dependencies, the procedure described below might take up an additional ca. 100MB on your hard drive.

Do I need this? If you go to http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html a message might pop-up saying you are missing some of the following fonts; CMSY10, CMEX10, Math1, Math2, Math4, Symbol

To fix:

For "CMSY10" and "CMEX10": install latex-xft-fonts through synaptic

For Math[1,2,4] (and possibly Symbol?): you need to download a file from Mathematicas site. But first, if you don't have wine installed, install it through synaptic. Now go to http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/latestfonts.html and download Mathematic 4.1 file (http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/files/MathFonts_TrueType_41.exe). Yes, it is a Windows .exe file. Firefox should now ask if it is to be opened with wine, select yes. Shortly, you should be provided with a windows-looking interface with a directory-tree. By default the files will be unpacked in the windows c fake-drive created by wine, but you can choose to unpack the files on your normal desktop by clicking in the "/" and then "home", "your name", and "Desktop". Make sure you add a new directory, i.e. mathmlfonts, so that your desktop does not become cluttered with the font files. Unzip and close.

You should now have a folder named "mathmlfonts" on your Desktop (or name otherwise if you choosed so). Now copy these files to your ~/.fonts directory

cp ~/Desktop/mathmlfonts/*.ttf ~/.fonts

To see if you need to proceed to the next step, check the test-site again to see if it pop-ups any messages. If still so, do the last step.

For "Symbol": install texlive-fonts-recommended through synaptic

Now you should be ready to access the test site above without any errormessages.

In the future the STIX fonts (http://www.stixfonts.org/) might provide a complete solution to this font issue.

Other sources of information are http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/

For Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) and newer:

sudo apt-get install xfonts-mathml ttf-lyx otf-stix

Having firefox4 already installed, and then, issuing the above command should be enough to get you started with MathML

The image at the top of this firefox4+MathML article shows the sort of results expected in firefox4 after the above install.

Further tests available at MathML test pages at mozilla.org