# MathJax Compiler in LaTex

Olivier Nicole olivier at chnik.fr
Sat Feb 5 14:38:12 CET 2022

Hello,

> Hi OLiver,
>
> Would you mind explaining that a bit better ? If possible with examples.
> I am not sure I understand it.
>
> /Also, MathML supports a few more constructs than TeX/.

I admit my statement was not very clear. The MathML description
language, and its specification, largely draw inspiration from TeX.
However the MathML specification describes a few mathematical elements
that, in (La)TeX, would require to use a dedicated package. That is the
case of some exotic things like detailed multiplication stacks or long
divisions (https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML/chapter3.html#presm.mult).
In fact, in TeX, even alignment environments (align, gather, etc.) are
not primitive but provided by packages such as amsmath, whereas there is
dedicated support for them in MathML.

That being said, it doesn’t mean that TeX is less powerful, since
anything can be written in TeX. I simply used this as an argument to say
that it stands to reason that the implementation of MathJax must be
different from that of TeX, since it has to support a different set of
primitive constructs.

Olivier

> On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 5:33 PM Olivier Nicole <olivier at chnik.fr
> <mailto:olivier at chnik.fr>> wrote:
>
>     The typesetting algorithm is very close to the time-tested
>     procedures designed by Knuth, but otherwise it's a different
>     program. MathJax can also take as input MathML and AsciiMath, and
>     the internal representation of formula is essentially a MathML tree.
>     Also, MathML supports a few more constructs than TeX.
>
>     Le 3 février 2022 23:47:42 GMT+01:00, "nobidy4me at outlook.com
>     <mailto:nobidy4me at outlook.com>" <nobidy4me at outlook.com
>     <mailto:nobidy4me at outlook.com>> a écrit :
>
>         MathJax compiles Latex equation input for the web rendering
>         output in HTML5 via CSS, javascript, & SVG. Does anyone know if
>         this is a clean start from scratch effort or simply a rewrite of
>         Knuth's original code into javascript?
>
>         Guido
>