I use MathJax on one site I'm developing. It has two problems related to speed:<p>1. It is so modular that you cannot really optimize it using something like Google Closure (<a href="http://code.google.com/closure/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/closure/</a> ). If you do, it breaks it.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>[MathJax, on the other hand, looks glorious. Many thanks to the people in charge of the project!]
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.<p>The documentation page just says "Open Source", the FAQ and download pages nothing at all.<p>The release announcement at <a href="http://www.mathjax.org/2010/01/12/news/mathjax-beta-released/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mathjax.org/2010/01/12/news/mathjax-beta-released...</a> finally says "Apache 2.0 open source license".<p>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.
We use MathJax for inline display of equations in the GitHub wikis and it's really nice. I spent a long time looking for a LaTeX style math solution for the web, and MathJax was a great fit.
MathJax is the secret sauce behind the pretty math typesetting at <i>The Tau Manifesto</i> (<a href="http://tauday.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tauday.com/</a>). For what it's worth, Davide Cervone, the lead developer of MathJax, is incredibly helpful and friendly. In the process of writing <i>The Tau Manifesto</i>, I was running into some weird problems; Davide realized that there was a subtle MathJax bug when used with HTML5, and pushed a fix within hours of finding the problem.
Looks nice! Minor issue with spacing in my browser: <a href="http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/6766/spacingissue.png" rel="nofollow">http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/6766/spacingissue.png</a><p>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}<p>Source of the bottom equation is:<p><math display="block">
<mrow>
<msup>
<mi>c</mi>
<mn>2</mn>
</msup>
<mo>=</mo>
<msup>
<mi>a</mi>
<mn>2</mn>
</msup>
<mo>+</mo>
<msup>
<mi>b</mi>
<mn>2</mn>
</msup>
<mo>−</mo><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>b</mi>
<mrow><mo>cos</mo><mi>θ</mi></mrow></mrow><p><pre><code> </math>
</code></pre>
Browser is Chrome 8.0.552.215 on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit
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).<p>Looks nice on the machine I use as a js sandbox, though.
Firefox 4 on Linux gives a message at the bottom saying something like "WebFonts not supported, falling back to image fonts", meaning that the scaling examples look horrible and most examples are very fuzzy. Shame, looks neat otherwise :)
I'd like to port a large LaTeX document to a web browsable format but it makes heavy use of pstricks and picture environments. Can anyone comment on how well this would cope with that or what alternatives might help?
Looks ugly here. The letters are overlapping.<p><a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/388822/mathjax.png" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/388822/mathjax.png</a><p>Chrome 7.0.517.44