Re: behavior of @math with HTML output

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 08:40:58AM -0700, Raymond Toy wrote:

> > I tested the page
> > https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-demos-web/tex-chtml.html
> > with lynx (there are no Texinfo manuals with mathjax enabled I know of,
> > if anybody knows about one, please tell me), and the result seems good
> > to me, the LaTeX code is shown which is not a bad choice for math in
> > a terminal.
> >
> 
> For one example of a texinfo doc using Mathjax, see
> https://maxima.common-lisp.dev/.  In particular, you can look at
> https://maxima.common-lisp.dev/docs/maxima_79.html.  A maxima user (who
> might be blind?) says that the MathJax-enabled formulas work really well
> with a screen reader.  Mathjax appears to support accessibility well.
> 
> I don't have lynx and actually have no interest in using a text-only
> browser.

Rendering mathematical notation in a text terminal can work well for
very simple formulae but breaks down for more complex formulae, like

J_v(z) = \sum_{k=0}^{\infty }{{{\left(-1\right)^{k}\,\left(z\over 
2\right)^{v+2\,k}
 }\over{k!\,\Gamma\left(v+k+1\right)}}}

(from the Maxima link above).  As I've said before, there is no way we are
going to write code in texi2any to parse this and produce text output.

(We are talking about terminal emulators here of course, not the
obsolete physical text terminals where it's questionable whether many
of the characters like ≠ or √ would have worked anyway.)