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MathJax, beautiful math in all browsers

mathjax.org

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Re: MathJax, beautiful math in all browsers

#5
Very nice, I'm looking forward to usinig it. So I thought I'd check the license to see if it's compatible with what I envision.

The documentation page just says "Open Source", the FAQ and download pages nothing at all.

The release announcement at http://www.mathjax.org/2010/01/12/news/mathjax-beta-released... finally says "Apache 2.0 open source license".

Note to other developers: don't hide your license -- it's a piece of information others might actually be interested in, particularly if it's not an application, but more of a library.

Re: MathJax, beautiful math in all browsers

#6
Sometimes, when the ol' fever comes back and nobody's there to remind me that we have come to accept HTML/CSS, I dream of a world wide web built on TeX and TeX alone. It's a place of wonder, and happiness, and river-less paragraphs. Then I wake up, sweating, screaming, to a world without proper hyphenation. XeTeX is my XaNaX. Makes the web-pain go away.

[MathJax, on the other hand, looks glorious. Many thanks to the people in charge of the project!]

Re: MathJax, beautiful math in all browsers

#8
I use MathJax on one site I'm developing. It has two problems related to speed:

1. It is so modular that you cannot really optimize it using something like Google Closure (http://code.google.com/closure/ ). If you do, it breaks it.

2. The modularity means that you're likely to need a few roundtrips to the server to get everything. Invariably these block the loading of the page and you get a hang, sometimes for a few seconds. This is not good for user experience.

Of course MathJax solves a very important problem, but it's a problem browsers have introduced. None of the support MathML in a sane way: Firefox requires content served as fully valid XHTML (good luck with that if you're using a CMS) and Webkit only got MathML support recently in the nightly releases. If browsers actually implement MathML in a way developers can use without losing hair, then MathJax is no longer needed. Till then, I love MathJax despite its warts.

Re: MathJax, beautiful math in all browsers

#9
Right now this works for some people and not others, because they aren't doing progressive enhancement over a server-side fallback rendering. The TeX samples just show raw \macros and the HTML-CSS renderings of the MathML samples are incorrect (x=−b±b2−4ac2a is not the quadratic formula).

Looks nice on the machine I use as a js sandbox, though.

Re: MathJax, beautiful math in all browsers

#10
Looks nice! Minor issue with spacing in my browser: http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/6766/spacingissue.png

Source of the top equation is: J_\alpha(x) = \sum_{m=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^m}{m! \, \Gamma(m + \alpha + 1)}{\left({\frac{x}{2}}\right)}^{2 m + \alpha}

Source of the bottom equation is:

c 2 = a 2 + b 2 −2ab cosθ

      
Browser is Chrome 8.0.552.215 on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit
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