Re: Idea to support math in HTML output

[Oliver Heimlich]

Hi Gavin and Karl,

On 31.05.2016 23:56, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Oliver and Gavin and all,
> 
>     support for a program called tex2ht, but I've never used it.
> 
> tex4ht

TeX4ht could be an alternative for what I'd like to achieve. I'll try
and see what it can do for me.

>     > - I have to find a way to bundle / integrate / use the other perl module
>     > LaTeXML into Texinfo.
> 
> LaTeXML (http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML) is a fantastic program, but it is
> huge -- 7MB, and that does not count the required XML::LibXML and libxml
> and lots more painful, unportable, system/version-dependent stuff.  Thus
> I doubt it is feasible or desirable to include it in Texinfo.  Rather,
> makeinfo could check if it is installed when it is needed (many Texinfo
> documents don't use @math after all), and use it/fall back/whatever.

I'll keep that in mind.

> I wonder about using mathjax (and conditionally incorporating it in the
> HTML output, if desired).  The effort to make @math{} strings usable by
> MathJax or by LaTeXML seems similar.

Yes, that would be a cheap solution. All it needs is to use some markup
in HTML to allow MathJax identification of math code. <em>…</em> is not
enough for that, but if we changed that to (for example) <em>$…$</em>,
the tex2jax preprocessor of MathJax could do the conversion easily and
the job would be done.

However, I don't like that solution because it would require the use of
Javascript on the client-side (even if the browser has built-in math
rendering support) and it would lower the need to implement HTML5 math
rendering support in more browsers. For example, Chrome has discarded
MathML support because of security concerns and because MathJax seems to
be a working alternative to everyone.

I am not a fan of MathJax.


Thanks for the nice feedback so far. I will dive into the code and see
if I can get something useful done. I'll use a distributed VCS on top of
SVN such that I can (if necessary) start without waiting for your
release work to finish.

Best
Oliver