About texvccheck

texvc takes the user input validates it and replaces MediaWiki specific functions. Input data is parsed and scrutinized for safety.

texvc was written by Tomasz Wegrzanowski for use with MediaWiki; it's included as part of the MediaWiki package (http://www.mediawiki.org) and is under the GPL license.

texvc-lite, was extracted from the original texvc program in 2013 by Moritz Schubotz and uses only the sanitizing and customization part.

The list of all commands can be viewed by browsing the source files. Most commands are listed at http://sdrv.ms/15w2gVw there is also a tool for convenient whitelisting of special commands that are used in local wikis.

Please report bugs at: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ with "MediaWiki extensions" as product and "Math" as component.

Setup

Requirements

OCaml 3.06 or later is required to compile texvc; this can be acquired from http://caml.inria.fr/ if your system doesn't have it available.

The makefile requires GNU make.

In Ubuntu Precise, all dependencies can be installed using:

$ sudo apt-get install ocaml

Installation

Run 'make' (or 'gmake' if GNU make is not your default make). This should produce the texvccheck executable.

By default, MediaWiki will search in this directory for texvc, if you moved it elsewhere, you'll have to modify $wgTexvc and set it to the path of the texvc executable.

Usage

Normally texvc is called from MediaWiki's Math modules and everything Just Works. It can be run manually for testing or for use in another app.

Command-line parameters

texvccheck '\TeX input string'

Be sure to properly quote the TeX code!

Example:

texvc "y=x+2"

Output format

The output is the sanitized and customized tex string.

texvc output format is like this:

+%s		ok
S		syntax error
E		lexing error
F%s		unknown function %s
-		other error

Hacking

Before you start hacking on the math package its good to know the workflow, which is basically:

1. texvc gets called by Math/Math.body.php (check out the line begining with "$cmd")
2. texvc does its magic, which is basically to check for invalid latex code.
3. texvc takes the user input validates it and replaces MediaWiki specific functions