[GTALUG] MathML Support on the Internet

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2020-08-17 8:04 p.m., Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
> I copied the MathML code from a site on MathML.  I want to learn it.

MathML isn't really designed to be human-writeable. It's mostly a 
presentational format. I wouldn't spend time on it.

> If it works in Midori but not on Chrome, it doesn't work.  If it
> works on Chrome but not on Midori, it is not reliable.

MathJax, then? It's a fairly sizeable JS library that renders TeX as 
inline equations. It works everywhere. It's not ideal, but it's what we 
have to live with if we want nice things.

Curiously, when I tried Midori, the MathML text came out really small, 
so it really depends on what fonts you have installed. otter-browser 
(seemingly the old Opera rendering library dusted off a bit) did a 
really nice job, but no font hinting, so eww.

> I am posting articles prepared with LaTeX.  The HTML conversion
> converts the equations to bitmaps.  These are reliable, however
> crappy they look.

Bitmaps are illegible for people with vision impairments. Some of the 
nicer converters include the TeX source as alt text as a 
better-than-nothing fixup.

There are many converters, each with varying features. latex2html has 
been around for decades. latexml has some powerful features, but has 
gaps that might fail you. Pandoc works irritatingly well too. All have 
options for images, MathML, MathJax, ...

cheers,
  Stewart