5 ms·

Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?

by mjf2 12y ago

Tomte 12y ago
I've read about "experimental partial MathJax support" or something like that in the changelog, but I haven't looked into it, yet. It's actually one of the big questions I'm having, as well.
ska 12y ago
This is the real kicker for some applications. After all, Knuth didn't write TeX because he needed a typography solution, he wrote it because he needed a typography solution for mathematics. All these years later, and TeX (with or without LaTeX) is far and away the best solution I know of. As for the mass market: Word's typesetting of mathematics is terrible, as is the interface (for anything but the simplest expressions). MathML is an interesting idea, but has a long way to go on the actual typesetting, as well as being much more painful to use than LaTeX...
- mjf2 12y ago
  Mathematica has a pretty decent typesetting system, but it's not open source or free...
  - ska 12y ago
    True. When last I looked it wasn't quite competitive with TeX but still pretty good compared to, say Word. But it is also a niche system.
mbutterick 12y ago
You can use MathJax inside Pollen today. As far as building more integrated support for math typesetting, I'd like to do that, but what I'm not sure about yet are the ergonomics. Ideally, you'd just be able to drop TeX-style math expressions into the markup, indicating whether they're inline or block, and Pollen would do the right thing in terms of handling the rendering (based on whether the output is a web page vs. something else).
- Tomte 12y ago
  How do you think about MathJax vs. pre-rendering formulae to images and using those, with the TeX input as the alt attribute? Oh, and using STIX or whatever as web font.
  - soegaard 12y ago
    There is already a couple of packages for Racket that prerenders formulas in TeX into various graphic formats (they call LaTeX to the rendering). It is straightforward to use these from Pollen.
    - Tomte 12y ago
      I know that it's straightforward, I'd like to hear about pros and cons I haven't found myself.
      - soegaard 12y ago
        If you want an html-page that works offline, then MathJax is rather large. In that case it makes sense to generate pdfs or svgs containing the formulas. Otherwise using MathJax from a CDN is quite convenient. On mobile rendering a page with many formulas via MathJax is somewhat slow though.
- ska 12y ago
  knitr does this reasonably well for letting you drop LaTeX directly into R reports with a delimiter... if you haven't seen that might be worth a look at the interface in some examples (e.g. http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/showcase/ http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/showcase/)

Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?

by mjf2 12y ago

Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?

Tomte 12y ago

I've read about "experimental partial MathJax support" or something like that in the changelog, but I haven't looked into it, yet. It's actually one of the big questions I'm having, as well.

ska 12y ago

This is the real kicker for some applications. After all, Knuth didn't write TeX because he needed a typography solution, he wrote it because he needed a typography solution for mathematics. All these years later, and TeX (with or without LaTeX) is far and away the best solution I know of. As for the mass market: Word's typesetting of mathematics is terrible, as is the interface (for anything but the simplest expressions). MathML is an interesting idea, but has a long way to go on the actual typesetting, as well as being much more painful to use than LaTeX...

mjf2 12y ago
Mathematica has a pretty decent typesetting system, but it's not open source or free...
- ska 12y ago
  True. When last I looked it wasn't quite competitive with TeX but still pretty good compared to, say Word. But it is also a niche system.

mbutterick 12y ago

You can use MathJax inside Pollen today. As far as building more integrated support for math typesetting, I'd like to do that, but what I'm not sure about yet are the ergonomics. Ideally, you'd just be able to drop TeX-style math expressions into the markup, indicating whether they're inline or block, and Pollen would do the right thing in terms of handling the rendering (based on whether the output is a web page vs. something else).

Tomte 12y ago
How do you think about MathJax vs. pre-rendering formulae to images and using those, with the TeX input as the alt attribute? Oh, and using STIX or whatever as web font.
- soegaard 12y ago
  There is already a couple of packages for Racket that prerenders formulas in TeX into various graphic formats (they call LaTeX to the rendering). It is straightforward to use these from Pollen.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    I know that it's straightforward, I'd like to hear about pros and cons I haven't found myself.
    - soegaard 12y ago
      If you want an html-page that works offline, then MathJax is rather large. In that case it makes sense to generate pdfs or svgs containing the formulas. Otherwise using MathJax from a CDN is quite convenient. On mobile rendering a page with many formulas via MathJax is somewhat slow though.
ska 12y ago
knitr does this reasonably well for letting you drop LaTeX directly into R reports with a delimiter... if you haven't seen that might be worth a look at the interface in some examples (e.g. http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/showcase/ http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/showcase/)