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Comment by dllu | Hacker News Reader

My blog (eg https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y2021m09d08/ ) uses MathJax on the serverside (via mathjax-node-cli) which gets rendered into SVG images. I find that this is nice because it's faster and the page doesn't jump around all the time while the equations are rendering. Equations can be cached. I can add alt text for accessibility.

Common mistakes that other people make when using an image-based approach include:

* failing to apply the proper sizing and offset for the baseline * using a raster PNG format which is bigger and looks fuzzy

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> I can add alt text for accessibility

Math ML is much more than alt text. It presents mathematical expressions in a hierarchical, tree-like way, letting you explore parts of the expression in detail. Depending on the implementation, you may also be able to adjust the verbosity or render the expression in Braille using one of a few different math codes.

If you want accessible math, just alt text is not enough.

True. The alt text in my case contains the LaTeX which contains all the information to define the equation. But you're right that a standard like MathML would allow for other surfaces like Braille.

MathJax can generate MathML from Latex and all modern browsers render MathML now.

Woah! Chrome finally added support for MathML! I had no idea, apparently it landed in January of this year.

The way I have it set up in my use case is that if you click on the equation it switches to a brief description of what the equation is doing. Pretty useful for quickly parsing it for someone unfamiliar.

Check out Pretext, it's write once, read anywhere software package that supports cross platform publication output including Braille [1],[2].

It's a very powerful authoring and publication system, for example if you're writing an interactive Math book, you could use <sage/> blocks to specify language e.g. Python, write around code blocks, providing references to equations, etc [3].

Fun facts, PreTeXt was originally called MathBook XML thus it has robust support for mathematical formulas [4],[5].

Last but not least, don't let XML being used in Pretext scared you off since XML is great for markup language and anything todo with publication online, printed, Braille, etc [6].

[1] PreTeXt Write Once, Read Anywhere:

https://pretextbook.org/

[2] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publishing System:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231025

[3] The PreTeXt Guide: 3.17 Sage:

https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/overview-sage.html

[4] The PreTeXt Guide: 4.9 Mathematics:

https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/topic-mathematics.htm...

[5] The PreTeXt Guide: Chapter 13 Mathematics

https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/basics-ch-math.html

[6] XML is better than YAML – Hear me out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37586580

How do you feel about the tradeoff of losing copy-and-paste functionality? I'm not implying it's a bad decision - there are tradeoffs in every option - but I'm wondering what you thought about it.

With the alt text, copying and pasting actually works as you expect.

Ohhh I didn't know that. For others trying it:

* Right-click > copy copies the image itself

* Highlight the image, then Right-click > copy gives you the alt text

Huh, that's surprising. I've never actually checked but always considered that they'd give the same result. Somewhat cumbersome, if one considers how few people know of this functionality though.

If you're going to send out math as SVGs anyway, you can also just use your normal latex to PDF renderer (e.g. pdflatex) on each formula, and then convert the output PDFs to SVGs. That way, you get the same output you'd get with latex, and you can also use latex packages that aren't supported by MathJax (e.g. tikz-cd). I've prototyped a latex to html converter [1] based on that approach, but it's probably not ready for serious use. Here's an example: https://www.mbid.me/lcc-model/

[1] https://github.com/mbid/latex-to-html

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