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Mathfield Architecture

Overview

  • Glyphs The basic building blocks of the mathfield are glyphs. A glyph is a visual representation of a character or symbol. Glyphs can be combined to form more complex structures, such as fractions, radicals, accents, etc...

    Glyphs are encoded using the Unicode standard, and are rendered using a font that supports the Math OpenType layout.

    Some LaTeX commands are represented by a single glyph, such as \alpha, \subeq, etc...

  • Data Model
    The data model is a tree structure that represents the content of the mathfield.

    The data model also includes a set of properties that describe the state of the mathfield, such as the selection, the insertion point, the current mode, etc...

    The data model includes the following types of nodes:

    • text nodes, which represent text content
    • mathlist nodes, which represent mathematical content as a sequence of symbols and nodes
    • command nodes, which represent commands
    • placeholder nodes, which represent placeholders
    • error nodes, which represent errors
    • space nodes, which represent spacing
    • line nodes, which represent line breaks
    • box nodes, which represent boxes
    • rule nodes, which represent rules
    • genfrac nodes, which represent general fractions
    • surd nodes, which represent square roots
    • accent nodes, which represent accents
    • overunder nodes, which represent over and under scripts
    • delim nodes, which represent delimiters. These include paired delimiters
    • (i.e. \left, \right commands).
    • table nodes, which represent tables (arrays, matrix, etc...)

    The data model is used to render the mathfield by generating a LaTeX render tree (or other render tree) and to serialize the content of the mathfield to a LaTeX string, MathASCII or MathJSON.

  • Render Tree The render tree is a tree structure that represents the visual rendering of the mathfield. It is generated from the data model and is used to render the mathfield on the screen.

    It includes geometric information such as the position and size of each element, as well as the visual representation of each element.

    The nodes in the render tree can inherit properties from their parent nodes, such as the color, font, size, etc...

    The render tree can generate a rendering of the mathfield as a DOM tree, a canvas, a SVG or MathML tree.

    Some of the nodes in the render tree are:

    • vbox nodes, which represent boxes stacked vertically
    • hbox nodes, which represent boxes stacked horizontally, aligned on the baseline
    • glyph nodes, which represent a single character/symbol

  • Input Handlers The input handlers are responsible for processing input events and updating the data model accordingly. They include handlers for:

    • Pointer Input
    • Keyboard Input
    • Virtual Keyboard

    This also includes utilities to handle inline shortcuts (used by both the keyboard and the virtual keyboard). Keyboard shortcuts are also handled as part of the keyboard input.