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Comment by akurilin | Hacker News Reader

Heavy mathjax user here. Couple of use cases I'd love to know more about:

- does KaTeX work pretty reasonably across the platforms? The simplest way I figured out for rendering math notation in-app on mobile devices was through web views + mathjax. E.g. say I wanted to use it in a web view in iOS or Android, would it work as intended? MathJax comes by default with a giant folder of various fonts / ways of rendering, what's the KaTeX story for this?

- would KaTeX work just fine in a headless environment? e.g. say I'm using http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ to generate PDF from some HTML

- how does KaTeX compare to MathJax from a payload size? Mathjax takes quite a bit to load from basic connections even though you have to cache it only once.

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We try to test in lots of different environments, so it should work reasonably in most environments. To get the speed we wanted, we had to ditch much older browsers (we don't support IE 7 and earlier), and we only render to HTML/CSS, not things like MathML. However, we're so far very happy with the look of the math in the environments we've tested.

KaTeX works great in a headless environment. You can even do server side rendering if you want a browserless environment which can serve up straight HTML with no JS.

Both KaTeX and MathJax's biggest slowdown is the font loading. However, since KaTeX's CSS can be included manually (instead of letting MathJax put it in the DOM after load) it should load a little faster.

Also, looks like your use cases are similar to ours at Khan Academy! We've been struggling with MathJax on slow computers and iPads for a while, which is why we made this. Let me know if you want more info!

We actually work in the same space you guys do :)

We're all dealing with having to display more complex math to students once you get past 5th grade in the Common Core, also on web and iPads. Appreciate you folks taking the time to release something like this to the public. People haven't been hounding us down because of the slow UX yet, but I can see that happening down the line. I'm hoping we can open source some of our tools as well once we're your size :)

My only other question was: is KaTeX 100% interchangeable with MathJax as far as syntax goes? What I'm asking is if we already have a lot of content written for MathJax, will we need to massage it into a new syntax or should it work for the most part?

The syntax will be almost entirely interchangable with MathJax; we also have a lot of content in MathJax-flavored-TeX and need it to work. However there are a couple small things that MathJax did strangely that we'd like to fix.

However, there are some features we don't support yet, notably environments (with \begin/\end) and some symbols. If you're using more advanced features, you might hit some snags. If you're trying to do something simple and it's not working, feel free to submit an issue on github, we'll see what we can do for you.

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