Fixing display of math (gifs from MathML) in mapleTA3.01
This is a new user question.
mapleTA3.01 is installed on an Ubuntu linux server here at maths.uwa.edu.au
and on SUSE linux at maths.curtin.edu.au across the river here.
We have classes (around 1000 students at each institution) about to start soon
and have been forced by the maple vendor to switch from AiM to mapleTA.
(And, no worries, we will try. The March start date is scary.)
We are having problems with most maple-type questions, displaying maths.
Intermittently, the gif for the maths does not seem to get written.
These are from the maplesoft Calculus questions. It isn't in anything peculiar
that we have written ourselves (and we haven't had time to write our own
efforts yet).
We have looked at the .qu files and remain mystified.
(Personally, I think the alt tags should dump out something so that
one stands a better chance of tracking errors down.)
I presume maple has no problems with generating the MathML.
It is something like MathType or JEuclid, isn't it, which takes the
MathML and produces the gif? I don't know how it works, but I wonder if
missing fonts might cause an intermittent problem.
Help please
QUESTION: what should we do next?
- should work like paper
18 min 7 sec ago - I think what you want is
38 min 4 sec ago - An error in typo
3 hours 13 min ago - irem
4 hours 59 min ago - convert
6 hours 50 min ago - Premature evaluation, and floats versus integers
6 hours 54 min ago - No topic
7 hours 37 min ago - Anything for 11 anychance?
8 hours 11 min ago - Thank you!
8 hours 54 min ago - ^_^ it is ok now~
11 hours 27 min ago
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- Guelph, Ontario
- Creemore, Ontario
- Neustadt, Ontario
- Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Unsure
I am not sure from your description as to the problem that is happening but one thing that you should do (especially since you have indicated class starts soon) is contact the Maple vendor. For Australia the vendor should be CEANET. They should be able to work with you to solve the gif problem.
Scott
broken gifs
I sorted out what had happenned.
The owner and group for some directories in
/usr/local/mapleta30/html/tmp
which is where the gifs were to be written was wrong.
This appears to have been associated with an earlier installation
of mapleta3.0 as opposed to the later installation of mapleta3.01.
Anyway the mapleta3.01 didn't have write privileges for the old
subdirectories. Just doing a chown and chgrp fixed it.
Greg Gamble and Curtin and I at UWA have had some separate
issues associated with taking tomcat down and re-starting it.
The tech support in the School of Maths is producing a better
startup script, making appropriate use of
Xvfb
We get the impression that CEANET ask Waterloo / maplesoft
our questions. We would communicate with others with mapleTA
in East Australia if we knew any. We know that Uni of NSW
bought mapleTA, but haven't used it owing to LDAP issues.
We know people at UNSW. The other mapleTA sites we have heard of
are Uni of Adelaide and, starting soon we guess, Uni of Melbourne.
UWA and, to a lesser extent, Curtin have been forced to switch from AiM
into mapleTA. Our longer-term hope is that we port the maple coded
bits of AiM that are ahead of mapleTA into mapleTA.
It is possible that we are being used as guinea pigs with mapleTA3.01.
This is OK, but a direct line to the linux support people at
maplesoft would be nice. We learn reasonably quickly, so wouldn't
hassle people unnecessarily. And, we do hope to be useful.
Regards,
Grant Keady
MapleTA missing gifs
I know what Grant is talking about.
Intermittently, the gif for a
maple("printf(MathML:-ExportPresentation(stuff))")
just ends up being a broken tag.
It has nothing to do with syntax. Nor does it seem to have anything to do with the server type. My guess is that it has to do with memory. When I test questions, the problem never arises. But when lots of students start generating assignments, emails start rolling in with reports of this problem.
I allow students to make an unlimited number of attempts at an assignment before its due date. I used to limit the number of attempts, but this problem prompted me to remove the limit. My policy is that a student should first look through all of the questions before starting to work them. If any of them are "duds" because of the problem that Grant mentions, then they should submit the assignment for grading with blank answers and then generate a new version.
I do find, however, that sometimes students are not able to figure out that the question is a "dud." They see an error message for the missing tag embedded in the question, and think it is mathematics and ask me what to do. Oh well. Life goes on.