My organisation needs to update its website, which, in particular, will host a number of blogs and wikis on mathematics-related themes. We need to use some way of rendering of LaTeX on our web pages. Given a choice of MathJax and MathML, which one would you recommend? Any other solutions?
[Tex/LaTex] Comparing MathJax and MathML
mathjaxmathmlonlinetools
Related Solutions
I've been looking into this too, so I'll share some observations that fall rather short of a proper answer, which would really involve looking at a whole lot of source code and asking the right questions about it.
Parsers generating HTML+Math ML
- Nick Drakos & Ross Moore's Latex2html converter, written in Perl, which I think was the first converter to map equations to Math ML. In 1998, Ross Moore outlined his goals for Latex2html, tied to the now defunct, closed-source WebEq mathematics rendering software, and Webtex, which was an alternative syntax for mathematics designed for use in web pages. From the WebEq documentation: WebTeX always translates unambiguously into MathML, while LaTeX does not.
- itex2mml, in C by Paul Gartside & others, also based on Webtex, but with support for some Latex not supported in Webtex.
- tex4ht, written in C by Eitan Gurari and other eminent figures. It avoids having to parse Latex source by running
latexwith modified macros that insert specials into the DVI output, and parses the DVI output instead. - John McFarlan's Pandoc, as mentioned by Aditya, written in Haskell. Note that Pandoc supports generation of HTML, both with and without Math ML.
- MathJax allows generation of Math ML besides the usual boxes plus image fonts output. It has an impressive degree of support for Latex, including limited support for user macros.
Parsers generating XML
Jason Blevins has a list of tools that convert Latex documents to XML-based formats, and that handle equations reasonably. Romeo Anghelache's Hermes, which is part of a full Latex parser that generates XML with semantic markup, is worth singling out: like tex4ht, it works by running the Tex engine with macros to put specials in the DVI output, which it then parses; it supports a wider set of semantic markup.
Fragments of Latex or DVI
With the exception of the systems referencing Webtex, there doesn't seem to be much interest in clearly codifying subsets of Latex to be parsed, I guess because these are regarded as moving targets. Instead, lists of commands supported, like that I mentioned for Mathjax, seems to be the way things are done.
With DVI-based converters, the issue of parsing Latex goes away, replaced by the relatively trivial issue of parsing marked-up DVI and the trickier issue of identifying the semantically significant macros and constructing markup-issuing replacements that do not improperly interfere. I haven't looked at how this is done for equational layout. It would be a useful exercise to see how a converter from Tex formulae to those of It's worth noting that the representation of expressions is essentially a superset of that used by Heckmann & Wilhelm (1997) would work.
Syntax highlighting
A completely different kind of parsing is involved in syntax highlighting, where the idea is to help the author see the significance of the parts of the formulae. I don't know of any syntax highlighters that do an interesting job here: Auctex only raisers/lowers super&subscripts, but i haven't really looked.
Reference
Heckmann & Wilhelm, 1997, A Functional Description of TeX's Formula Layout.
Best Answer
There seem to be some very confused descriptions of MathML, which doesn't require iTeX or Ruby or any server side configuration at all.
You can't really compare MathJax and MathML as they are different things,
MathJax is a an implementation of a client side parser for both a TeX-like syntax and MathML.
Then (which ever input syntax is used for input) it can use various rendering methods including native MathML in the browser (including IE+MathPlayer, or recent WebKit builds, not just Firefox) or it can use CSS rendering.
Currently, if you don't want to use some JavaScript such as MathJax (or the simpler, less ambitious asciimathml) then you do need to serve the files as well formed XHTML (not necessarily valid XHTML, despite the comment above) however this is changing, MathML parsing is built into HTML5 so Firefox 4 (beta) for example will render MathML in an HTML page not just XHTML. So going forward a year or two one would expect HTML+MathML pages to not require any JavaScript or server side support at all. whereas a TeX like syntax (like a wiki) will always require some additional JavaScript or server processing.
Whether you want to use a linear TeX-like syntax or the XML/HTML syntax of MathML is pretty much a matter of choice, it is exactly analogous to a choice of whether to use a linear wiki style markup for your web pages, or to directly code (or generate) HTML markup. Sometimes one is more appropriate than the other, many sites use both wiki and traditional HTML markup, depending on the context.
David
(co editor of mathml2 and 3, and before that co-developer of latex2e, and before that a long time association with the Mathematics department at Manchester, and still an LMS member should you want any discussion offline at any stage about MathML, I'm easy enough to find:-)