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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

MathJax looks excellent.

MathJax is very flexible and its output is certainly high-quality. However, it is difficult to configure and package in my experience, and it's pretty slow.

We used it for a few years at Khan Academy before building KaTeX (https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/) which is around 50x faster to render in our experience, not even counting download size. We ran an A/B test for MathJax vs. KaTeX on the Khan Academy site and people completed measurably more exercises with the latter, even though they look identical. (KaTeX doesn't support everything MathJax does though – we still fall back to MathJax for a small fraction of our content.)

thanks for pointing out KaTex. Did not know it before

Thanks for making KaTex. Love the ease of installation, API and performance!

Why do you open the KaTeX source, but not the source for your mobile apps?

KaTeX is more likely to be useful out of the box to other developers, whereas the source of the mobile apps is not going to be a drop-in component that's useful; it'd have to be used more as a learning opportunity by interested devs. That's fine, but it's also a different market. In practical terms, the KA mobile apps also are much more KA-specific and need to be cleaned up before open-sourcing, and there's a worry that people would take the entire app and repackage it as their own (this happens all the time to open-sourced mobile apps, unfortunately). That said, open-sourcing the mobile apps is still something we want to do, so it may happen someday.

Sorry to hijack this thread and I appreciate your response.

Please keep in mind I don't ask about open sourcing the mobile apps to help other developers, rather, it's to help KA. There are lots of contributions and improvements that would be made by the community if given a chance, which would benefit everyone. Contributions would have to be managed yes, but that's something that done all the time for other projects.

We've open-sourced several other mostly-KA-specific parts of the site, including these:

https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises

https://github.com/Khan/perseus

https://github.com/Khan/live-editor

Contributions are few and far between; good contributions are even more so. It hasn't been worth the time investment, unfortunately.

MathJax is great, but you may also want to look at KaTeX, which is currently much faster:

http://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax-comparison.php

MathJax works reasonably well, but I can almost read the TeX source out loud faster than the browser renders it (together with PDF.js, this has been my go-to counterexample whenever someone claims that JavaScript is performant).

With formula-heavy text, I'm forced to split documents artificially into multiple short pages to make rendering reasonably fast.

KaTeX looks quite promising, but it was missing support for quite a bit of basic markup the last time I checked. Perhaps it's better now.

Is there a way to pre-render MathJax, say, for static blogs?

Apparently SVG output is an option since MathJax v2.0: https://docs.mathjax.org/en/v2.5-latest/output.html

MathJax is slow and doesn't work in RSS.

I'd love to let people read my blog entirely in their RSS reader. But unfortunately most of my posts won't render there.

I assume most RSS readers don't support CSS (and webfonts) fully? If they did you could use KaTeX's server-rendering feature to embed the actual HTML, but otherwise images are probably your best bet.

I'll have to check out KaTeX's server rendering. Might be exactly what I'm looking for.

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