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120 points by christopherolah 16 years ago · 35 comments

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PaulTopping 16 years ago

Word got out on MathJax a little early, as things tend to do on the web. We barely got a sample page up. Although it probably won't matter, our hope is you don't hammer MathJax too hard until we get things going and officially announce. Very soon now!

Paul Topping Design Science, Inc. (one of the MathJax founders)

  • slug 16 years ago

    Nice work! I can see the rendered formulas with firefox (3.5.5) but not with konqueror (kde 4.3.3).

  • jacobolus 16 years ago

    For the in-line version, is it possible to get the baseline on an equation to align with the baseline of the surrounding text? In your current demo page they are a bit off.

  • anigbrowl 16 years ago

    This is really great. Good work.

snewe 16 years ago

If you have a wordpress blog, wordpress.com will convert your latex to images using this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-latex/

est 16 years ago

Undocumented Google Chart API for LaTeX:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chs=1x0&ch...

jwr 16 years ago

We've been using jsMath on our FogBugz wiki internally for a while now. I'm very glad this is going mainstream. It's a lifesaver for companies that use wikis and do math.

mhartl 16 years ago

Yeah, so this is basically awesome. I've written a LaTeX-based markup language that I'm using for my Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/book), but it's really designed for putting math & physics books on the web as HTML while still making nice PDFs. One big challenge I've faced is making nice HTML math typesetting, which I solved using texvc (the secret of Wikipedia's math typesetting), but unfortunately texvc is no good at inline math. I was not looking forward to solving that problem. Along comes MathJax, and now I don't have to!

N.B. Being able to benefit from unexpected advances like this is exactly why I standardized on LaTeX, even though it's kind of a pain to convert it to HTML. If you're trying to solve the math typesetting problem and not using LaTeX, you're on the wrong (coughMathMLcough) track.

  • PaulTopping 16 years ago

    MathML allows math to be rendered to speech for people with disabilities, something that LaTeX won't do. It is also a much more solid REPRESENTATION. It is not an input language like LaTeX. Think of LaTeX as YOUR favorite math UI, whereas MathML is an underlying representation. The fact that you can View Source and read it is immaterial.

cool-RR 16 years ago

Very exciting. This project looks impressive and I really hope it succeeds.

Also, what would be really orgasmic is if it would be possible to type math in Latex inside the browser and see it displayed nicely like that. But this is probably asking for too much.

  • gnosis 16 years ago

    Now that they've gotten this far, what you describe can't be too far away.

christopherolahOP 16 years ago

This came up on the sage (FOSS alternative to Mathematica and freinds) mailing lists and I thought I'd post it here.

It always surprises me how difficult math on the Internet has turned out to be. Hopefully this can help...

  • hyperbovine 16 years ago

    MathML was supposed to be the answer, and we all know how that went. Just goes to show how over the top people were going with XML in the late 1990s. I mean,

      <math mode="display" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
      <mrow>
        <mi>x</mi>
        <mo>=</mo>
        <mfrac>
          <mrow>
            <mo form="prefix">&#x2212;<!-- &minus; --></mo>
            <mi>b</mi>
            <mo>&#x00B1;<!-- &PlusMinus; --></mo>
            <msqrt>
              <msup>
                <mi>b</mi>
                <mn>2</mn>
              </msup>
              <mo>&#x2212;<!-- &minus; --></mo>
              <mn>4</mn>
              <mo>&#x2062;<!-- &InvisibleTimes; --></mo>
              <mi>a</mi>
              <mo>&#x2062;<!-- &InvisibleTimes; --></mo>
              <mi>c</mi>
            </msqrt>
          </mrow>
          <mrow>
            <mn>2</mn>
            <mo>&#x2062;<!-- &InvisibleTimes; --></mo>
            <mi>a</mi>
          </mrow>
        </mfrac>
      </mrow>
      </math>
    
    to typeset the fucking quadratic formula?
    • PaulTopping 16 years ago

      MathML is not a human input language! MathML is a representation. While comparisons with TeX and LaTeX are inevitable, they serve different purposes. Look at the HTML/CSS used to render a dynamic menu sometime. I'm sure it is pretty ugly too.

gfodor 16 years ago

Wow.. this is the missing piece to the puzzle for a project I'm thinking about working on soon. Is this going to be open source?

christopherolahOP 16 years ago

It would be neat if we could use something like this to render equations on HN...

mreid 16 years ago

I guess mobile Safari is not one of the 20+ browsers that are supported at present. Anyone else not seeing rendered math on their iPhone?

andreyf 16 years ago

Neat! But... Mathjax - Math JavaScript and XML?

  • zackattack 16 years ago

    AJAX is not about XML anymore. A lot of people use XHRs with JSON. AJAX now refers to the dynamic phenomenon. So their name is indeed appropriate. Evolution.

    • blasdel 16 years ago

      XMLHttpRequest : XML :: JavaScript : Java :: Hamster : Ham

      They never had anything to do with one another, it's just the module that Microsoft happened to dump it in.

      • andreyf 16 years ago

        They never had anything to do with one another

        Not completely true... The X in XHR stands for XML, as that's what it parses natively [1], whereas parsing JSON wasn't native until relatively recently. JavaScript had Java's syntax. Not sure about hamsters and ham...

        1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534370(VS.85).aspx

        • blasdel 16 years ago

          From your link: "responseXML was introduced in Windows Internet Explorer 7" - in October 2006. XHR was first shipped with Internet Explorer 5 - in March 1999!

          JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks.

          Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).

    • WesleyJohnson 16 years ago

      Isn't that kind of like SAT no longer standing for anything and it just being the name of the test now? Or, was that movie just making that up?

pmichaud 16 years ago

This is really impressive-looking. I have at least one site that would benefit from this big time.

Jach 16 years ago

That's cool it's grown out of jsMath; I've been pretty happy with that for a while now.

nanexcool 16 years ago

Tab is crashing on Google Chrome 4.0.266.0 on Ubuntu.

  • Confusion 16 years ago

    Hmmm, no problem in 4.0.249.30, from the recently released linux version on a Debian system.

PaulTopping 16 years ago

Actually, MathJax.org is our preferred URL.

wkdown 16 years ago

503 ... anyone have a mirror?

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