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Issue created by David Benjamin@davidben

STIXNonUnicode rendering issue in Chrome on Mac with the HTML-CSS renderer

Issue Summary

\cal does not render in Chrome on Mac with the default HTML-CSS renderer.

Steps to Reproduce:

This was reported to me in the wild in https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9802109, but I extracted a minimal reproducer:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.9/MathJax.js?config=default"></script>
\(\cal N\)

(JSBin: https://jsbin.com/sopewoyoga/edit?html,output)

Load in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on Mac. In Chrome, the N appears as a box.

Technical details:

  • MathJax Version: 2.7.9
  • Client OS: macOS Version 13.1 (Build 22C65)
  • Browser: Chrome 109.0.5414.87

(arXiv seems to be on 2.7.3, but I updated to the latest 2.x release to confirm the issue wasn't already fixed. I was't able to reproduce this with v3, but it seemed, from https://www.mathjax.org/#gettingstarted, that v2 was still supported.)

I am using the following MathJax configuration: ?config=default

and loading MathJax via

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.9/MathJax.js?config=default"></script>

(I just adapted this from https://docs.mathjax.org/en/v2.7-latest/configuration.html#loading-mathjax-from-a-cdn; arXiv has their own copy.)

Supporting information:

I initially filed this on the Chrome side (I work on Chrome, but not anywhere near fonts) as https://crbug.com/1408154. That bug has some more details. It looks like the immediate change on the Chrome side was a change that caused MathJax to switch from the "HTML-Common" render to the "HTML-CSS" renderer.

This seems to relate in some way to the STIXfontBug workaround in MathJax. MathJax is using a slightly different style attribute between Chrome/Safari and Firefox, but the one sent to Chrome/Safari doesn't work in Chrome. The one sent to Firefox does though. https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/blob/legacy-v2-develop/unpacked/jax/output/HTML-CSS/fonts/STIX/fontdata.js#L1579-L1600

I tossed it to one of our fonts folks, who responded here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1408154#c1. Sounds like it's unclear whether it's an MathJax issue or a Chromium one. (And that in the latter case, a smaller reproducer would be handy.) I don't know anything about fonts, but I'm hoping that between the two of you, you all can figure out where it is. :-)