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Comment by arenaninja | Hacker News Reader

MathML, MathJax and now KaTeX

Not that there isn't a usecase for this, but is this fully MathJax compatible?

We're not compatible yet, but we're working on it! In the meantime, you can fallback to MathJax on things we don't support. That way, most things can be rendered fast, and anything super complicated gets special treatment. We'll be releasing something soon on how to do this, and if you use React you can use the KA TeX component: http://khan.github.io/react-components/#tex

So is your goal to be a faster MathJax-compatible alternative? We currently use MathJax, but there's definitely a need for faster rendering. As an example, we sometimes run a page load through wkhtmltopdf, and MathJax content can take a LONG time

EDIT: Thanks for replying to my comment in spite of the downvotes

Yep, that's our goal. Khan Academy does a bunch of math rendering, and our exercises were suffereing because of it. Hopefully some time we'll be able to stop using MathJax.

Well you've convinced me. I'm gonna go ahead and download it now and try to use it everywhere MathJax is used. If it works with what we have I might be able to sell this to my bosses

Sounds great! If you have any problems, feel free to report issues on github, or join the #katex room on freenode.

According to that code, the way to know you need to fallback to MathJax is simply catching `katex.ParseError.prototype`: https://github.com/Khan/react-components/blob/406d2210cfb1af...

Q: does this fallback method also cover browsers not supported by KaTeX but supported by MathJax?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com