[om-a] request for MathPlayer 2.0 beta testers

[Paul Topping]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce that MathPlayer 2.0 is ready for beta testing.
MathPlayer is Design Science's free MathML display engine for Microsoft
Internet Explorer. MP 2.0 has several major enhancements over the current
version 1.1:

- Support for XHTML+MathML documents. This allows publishing of a single XML
document that will work with both Internet Explorer and Netscape/Mozilla
without the use of the Universal Math Style Sheet. (Stylesheets will
continue to work, they just won't be required for cross-browser
compatibility.)

- Math accessibility: A new "Speak Expression" command on the right-click
menu will speak the mathematics. MathPlayer now also supports Microsoft's
standard Active Accessibility interface so that most screen readers will be
able to read MathML in Web pages.  This is mainly for demonstration
purposes; our ultimate goal is to provide full accessibility to math in Web
pages to those with print-related disabilities.

- MathZoom: A click in an equation will zoom it to 150% of normal into a
popup window allowing easy viewing of fine equation features such as primes,
hats, subscripts and superscripts. Click again to close it.

- Alignment support: MathML's <malign> and <maligngroup> elements are
supported.

- Better formatting: Many small tweaks have been made to MathPlayer's math
formatting, producing nicer-looking equations.

- We have dropped support for Internet Explorer 5.5 -- IE 6.0 or later is
now required. There were many things that didn't work so well in IE 5.5 and
rather than spend our development and testing time working around its
deficiencies, we'd prefer to spend it creating new software. We found that
less than 4% of MathPlayer users used IE 5.5 and we don't know of any reason
not to upgrade. If you think we've gotten it wrong, let us know.

If you are interested in testing the beta version of MathPlayer 2.0, please
send an email to betatest at dessci.com. If you have any questions regarding
MathPlayer, let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.

Paul Topping

Design Science, Inc.
"How Science Communicates"
Makers of MathType, WebEQ, MathPlayer, Equation Editor, TeXaide
http://www.dessci.com
--
om-announce at openmath.org  -  public announcements concerning OpenMath
Post discussion to om at openmath.org
Automatic list maintenance software at majordomo at openmath.org
Mail om-announce-owner at openmath.org for assistance with any problems