ChapterZero

I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before, but it seems like a viable alternative to LaTeXRender, for those people who either want their site to be pure (no images), faster loading, is worried about the security issues inherent in using a CGI system like LaTeXRender, or don’t have access to TeTeX:

jsMath is a JavaScript implementation of the TeX mathematics rendering engine— so you can enter TeX code n the way you are accustomed! And it looks incredibly comprehensive; better than any other system I’ve seen that uses character level manipulation to typeset math. You can see it for yourself by following the examples link from the homepage.

When I first visited the site, I didn’t have the TeX fonts installed, and the examples looked comparable in quality to one of those sites where the math images seem to have been scanned in: i.e., not too bad, but a little pixelated. If I hadn’t known what was up, I would have assumed they were poorly scanned images. So the system definitely has reasonable results even if you don’t have the special fonts installed. If the fonts are installed (I downloaded them and revisited the examples pages), the quality is incredibly good.

It would be cool if LaTeXRender supported jsMath in the same way it supported MimeTeX; then people who can’t install TeX would have another (maybe better) alternative. I intend to hack up the LaTeXRender system I’ve installed at some point, to support switching between using actual LaTeX and jsMath for rendering– I intend to hack it anyhow, because it’s pointless to keep using div tags to simulate display environments when that could easily be added into LaTeXRender directly.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Mathematical Fonts (12/17/2005)
• Installing TeTeX latex packages (2/28/2005)
• Plugin idea: modifications to LatexRender (7/19/2007)