Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MathJax

mathjax.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 44 posts

Re: MathJax

#3

Post by williamstein »

orange3xchicken wrote: post #2

If you are at all concerned with performance and can sacrifice a couple features (fewer supported text formatting options & mathematical elements, less legacy support for some browsers). Katex is a great alternative. https://katex.org/

Last time I compared Katex to MathJax, I was also very pleased by Katex's synchronous rendering support, as compared to mathjax.

In CoCalc.com I made it use Katex, but if there is an error it falls back to MathJax.

Re: MathJax

#5

Post by raphlinus »

williamstein wrote: post #3
orange3xchicken wrote: post #2

If you are at all concerned with performance and can sacrifice a couple features (fewer supported text formatting options & mathematical elements, less legacy support for some browsers). Katex is a great alternative. https://katex.org/

Last time I compared Katex to MathJax, I was also very pleased by Katex's synchronous rendering support, as compared to mathjax. In CoCalc.com I made it use Katex, but if there is an error it falls back to MathJax.

MathJax can do synchronous also, but it's a config option. The fact that it defaults to async really saddles it with the perception that it's incredibly slow. The async operation basically forces the browser to through many, many rounds of relayout, when in most cases it would be much more efficient to do it in one batch.

Re: MathJax

#6

Post by fizixer »

(edit 4: my comment is off-topic, sorry)

Mathjax reminds me of the AJAX hype. What happened to it? These days no one talks about AJAX. There was material design a few years later but that was just the looks.

Is AJAX now replaced with React.js? or a combination of other stuff (like HTML5 and modern-JS and React.js and stuff)?

edit: I just looked up Angular and apparently it was rewritten in Typescript, a strict superset of JS. This doesn't make sense. JS is known for massive amounts of cruft. An improvement would've been a scripting language that compiles to "JS: the good parts", i.e., a subset of JS. But now we should have "Typescript: the good parts" because TS inherited all the bad parts of JS?

edit 2: It turns out, there is valid JS that is invalid TS [0]. And yet, TS is described on wikipedia as "a strict superset of JS" [1]. (invalid TS == non-error-free TS).

edit 3: Further confirmation about error-free TS not being a strict superset of JS [2]. Such a lie can only be expected from a company like micro$hit.

edit 5: even with-error TS is not a superset of JS (the behavior is different) [3].

edit 6: Typescript is an opinionated-yet-spineless Javascript!

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/38546

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/53698835

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942886

Re: MathJax

#7

Post by compumike »

I use MathJax for rendering equations on https://ultimateelectronicsbook.com/ and it's worked very well from a rendering quality perspective. I looked at Katex for performance, but it didn't support all of the LaTeX formatting that I use.

You can scroll through https://ultimateelectronicsbook.com/systems-of-equations/ for a particularly formatting-heavy example with lots of matrix equations and augmented matrices, working through Gaussian decomposition and LU factorization examples.

Instead, for performance, I wrote a small Ruby / Jekyll plugin to do MathJax server-side rendering. It calls the mathjax-node npm package, with some caching on top because it's so slow. This outputs static HTML and CSS with a few math fonts.

The mathjax-node-sre npm package even populates aria-label fields for each equation:

    ...
If you have the option to consider server-side equation rendering, your users may thank you.

Re: MathJax

#9

Post by jszymborski »

fizixer wrote: post #6

(edit 4: my comment is off-topic, sorry) Mathjax reminds me of the AJAX hype. What happened to it? These days no one talks about AJAX. There was material design a few years later but that was just the looks. Is AJAX now replaced with React.js? or a combination of other stuff (like HTML5 and modern-JS and React.js and stuff)? edit: I just looked up Angular and apparently it was rewritten in Typescript, a strict supers…

FWIW, Mathjax doesn't have much to do with AJAX calls.

AJAX is just ubiquitous and it's easier to use without frameworks nowadays. React is a library that solves different problems from the frameworks that made AJAX easier like Prototype and jQuery.

React helps folk build UIs through interesting data-models and the ShadowDOM. AJAX is required by anything but the most trivial React projects to make server-side requests.

Hope that helps :)

Re: MathJax

#10

Post by strikelaserclaw »

fizixer wrote: post #6

(edit 4: my comment is off-topic, sorry) Mathjax reminds me of the AJAX hype. What happened to it? These days no one talks about AJAX. There was material design a few years later but that was just the looks. Is AJAX now replaced with React.js? or a combination of other stuff (like HTML5 and modern-JS and React.js and stuff)? edit: I just looked up Angular and apparently it was rewritten in Typescript, a strict supers…

AJAX is just a set of principles to make client side web applications more dynamic by getting all the data async and updating the DOM. AJAX is very much alive in modern client side js frameworks like Angular, react etc... It is just abstracted away a little (or a lot).
Post reply on HN