I'm curious: why does this work so much better than MathJax? What's the technical "secret sauce" that makes this tick? I was looking for that on the site and in the README, but it doesn't seem to have any explanation as to the tricks that make up KaTeX.
KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
81–90 of 101 posts
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#82I'm wondering how heavy the server-side rendered version is. I assume you don't have to load the JS file anymore for that one, but you still need the CSS and the fonts. Is there an estimate on how large those are in total?
How large is the performance difference between the server-side rendered version and the JS version?
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#83A great idea would be that when you copy a math expression from the browser, it would put the LaTeX code in the copy-paste buffer: f(x) = \int_{-\infty}^\infty \hat f(\xi)\,e^{2 \pi i \xi x} \,d\xi So then I could paste it in an email, in a text editor, in my own LaTeX document, etc.
I recently discovered this works in wikipedia,i.e. if copying the first rendered formula in a page[0] I get latex code. Not sure if it's just the alt text. [0] Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice and you get \forall X \left[ \emptyset \notin X \implies \exists f \colon X \rarr \bigcup X \quad \forall A \in X \, ( f(A) \in A ) \right] \,.
I get “∀X[∅∉X⟹∃f:X→⋃X∀A∈X(f(A)∈A)]” – i.e. the Unicode representation (without having configured anything). I’d even argue that this is correct/desired in this particular case, although of course not all formulae can be correctly expressed in pure Unicode characters without formatting commands.
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#84Is there support for matrices?
Neither
\begin{bmatrix}
a & b \\
c & d
\end{bmatrix}
\begin{array}{ccc}
a & b & c \\
d & e & f \\
g & h & i
\end{array}
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#85MathML, MathJax and now KaTeX Not that there isn't a usecase for this, but is this fully MathJax compatible?
We're not compatible yet, but we're working on it! In the meantime, you can fallback to MathJax on things we don't support. That way, most things can be rendered fast, and anything super complicated gets special treatment. We'll be releasing something soon on how to do this, and if you use React you can use the KA TeX component: http://khan.github.io/react-components/#tex
According to that code, the way to know you need to fallback to MathJax is simply catching `katex.ParseError.prototype`:
https://github.com/Khan/react-components/blob/406d2210cfb1af...
Q: does this fallback method also cover browsers not supported by KaTeX but supported by MathJax?
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#86I wish there was an entire LaTeX-like templating language. Not just the math typesetting; the typesetting is, for the most part, raw TeX.
Markdown is very deficient in, say, organizing a blog post in several sections and subsections. There's formatting syntax, but not semantic syntax. No support for different styling at a higher level (in the template renderer); no support for generating indexes, footnotes.
(The state of footnotes on the web in 2014 is lamentable).
All these valiant efforts in having portable math typesetting that like to make puns with "LaTeX" fall regrettably short of enabling one to make a short blogpost detailing a mathematical curiosity, or even heavily-referenced semi-scholarly output. LaTeX is a template engine that happens to leverage a programmable typesetter. We have a programmable typesetter with modern JavaScript, can we focus on semantic templating already?
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#87I wish there was an entire LaTeX-like templating language. Not just the math typesetting; the typesetting is, for the most part, raw TeX. Markdown is very deficient in, say, organizing a blog post in several sections and subsections. There's formatting syntax, but not semantic syntax. No support for different styling at a higher level (in the template renderer); no support for generating indexes, footnotes. (The stat…
If only we had some sort of standard, perhaps XML based syntax which is both standardised and well supported cross-browser, doesn't need JavaScript except for a few enhancements as and when it's needed.
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#88I wish there was an entire LaTeX-like templating language. Not just the math typesetting; the typesetting is, for the most part, raw TeX. Markdown is very deficient in, say, organizing a blog post in several sections and subsections. There's formatting syntax, but not semantic syntax. No support for different styling at a higher level (in the template renderer); no support for generating indexes, footnotes. (The stat…
This reminds me of a comment[0] by a math grad student, Chao Xu, who extended markdown documents parsed by pandoc to ennumerate Proofs, Lemmas, etc., leading to blog posts that feel like part of a math text. One starts with a line beginning with, e.g., {proof}, and any content that follows and is indented (until non-indented text) is included with this section.
EDIT: also wanted to add that most markdown parsers that I've used (pandoc, python markdown) have support for footnotes and tables, though footnotes are compiled at the end of the document instead of at the end of individual 'sections' or 'subsections', which is a major pain for longer documents.
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#89Related: KaTeX on Gitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324991
Re: KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
#90Is there support for matrices? Neither \begin{bmatrix} a & b \\ c & d \end{bmatrix} nor \begin{array}{ccc} a & b & c \\ d & e & f \\ g & h & i \end{array} works.
Doesn't look like it:
https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX/wiki/Function-Support-in-KaTeX