Re: ELPA submission: mathjax.el

[Augusto Stoffel]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 at 23:54, Richard Stallman wrote:

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> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > I would like to add the package residing at the following location to
>   > ELPA:
>
>   > https://github.com/astoff/mathjax.el
>
> As I recall, mathjax does a useful job, but depends on a browser to
> run special Javascript code.  It has been some years since I heard
> about that -- is my memory right?  If not, could you explain how
> things really work?

If it was years ago then it was probably right at the time.  In the
meanwhile, however, standalone JS environments have appeared.
Apparently many people like JS and use it to develop regular programs.

MathJax is just a JS library and it can run in those standalone JS
interpreters to produce images from formulas (in TeX or MathML
notation).  So that's what my package does: it runs one of those
standalone JS interpreter and loads the MathJax library in it.

> This raises an issue which is one of the biggest issues in computing
> and freedom: how to give users control over the Javascript programs
> that run in their browsers.

Just to emphasize: MathJax as well as its JS dependencies and the
standalone JS interpreter are all free software.  So for my package this
is not an issue.

> I have an idea for how perhaps to do that.  I don't know enough
> about web browsers and Javascript to be sure whether it can work.
> Could you please work with me to explore the possibility?
>
> The first step is to think about how the Mathjax Javascript program
> couples to and relates to the Emacs Lisp program.  Could you please
> explain how that coupling works now?

The coupling is via good old pipes, with MathJax running as a subprocess
of Emacs (like a non-interactive Comint, basically).