[tex4ht] No math rendering

Sun Apr 17 05:00:42 CEST 2011

Radhakrishnan CV <cvr at river-valley.org> writes:

> Why not consider moving to MathML which is now part of HTML5 specs and
> already supported by browsers like Firefox and Opera?

I think this is the way to go.  If one is concerned about browsers
that don't support MathML or about users who don't make the effort
to acquire proper fonts, then one can still use MathJax for the
rendering by simply inserting a suitable <script> invocation for
MathJax in the <head> of the html document.

> It is not a big task to verbatim copy the TeX code for inline math.

But this "copying" cannot be literally verbatim.  Adjustments will
be needed.  For example, "<" must be morphed to "<".

>> The rationale for my wish comes from MathJax: it makes a great
>> job rendering LaTeX equations in HTML, and it seems that it
>> works better with a pure LaTeX input than with, say, the input
>> given through the jsMath option of tex4ht (even though there is
>> an extension to MathJax to handle jsMath-style inputs).

I'm not familiar with the jsMath option of tex4ht.  But it should
be easy enough to use the "correct" html+mathml route through tex4ht
and then modify the document <head>.

> Actually, it is in our TODO list to write separate packages for
> MathJax. In fact, there is a request pending from MathJax developers
> in this regard. Volunteers are welcome.

Aha!  But are they asking for pseudo-TeX math or just for MathML that
is tuned for the text/html version of html5 and known browser quirks
(such as the avoidance of xml-style self-closing empty elements)?

                                    -- Bill