What's the best way to write Mathematical Equations on the Web?

Question

I am working on a Math related web page and am looking for a solution to writing Mathematical equations easily onto a web page. There are several solutions readily available to me at the moment:

• Use LaTeX and publish them on my web page as images.
• Use MathML

Both of these solutions aren't ideal and seem somewhat dated. Replacing what should be text with an image is never a good idea and MathML isn't compliant with all browsers/operating systems.

I'm hoping that there is a modern solution to using images or MathML, perhaps something utilising sIFR to display mathematical equations? After a bit of research I am still yet to find any real solution.

Please note that I am asking for a new way of publishing equations. I do not want images to be the output that is displayed on the web page and would rather have these equations rendered as textual data. MathML is the closest I've come, but it's still not ideal. I've wondered for a while whether a replacement tool like sIFR could be utilised to create equations in Flash. Anyone have any suggestions on this front?

EDIT: jsMath is the closest we have at the moment. If you're looking to display Mathematical Equations on a web page then this is by far the best way of doing it.

Similar Question: Math equations on the web

Answer 1

I've been using the LaTeX plugin for the Confluence wiki to write equations on the web (well, on the intranet). It displays an image in the web browser, but you can still see the LaTeX source if you edit the page.

I don't know what you're using to host the web site, but you could maybe use a similar approach: embed the LaTeX source in the page, and render it as an image for the web browser.

Answer 2

You can write your latex directly in your HTML page and display it dynamically using this library :

http://www.codecogs.com/components/equationeditor/equationeditor.php

Answer 3

LaTeX is use extensively already on the net and in academia to render equations.

A great example of this is wikipedia have a look at this page for 1 example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude

I know this is a generlisation but: Using images is a viable way to achieve many things on the web in a browser compatible way - provided you provision for some of the shortcomings. ( eg. Google Maps, Rounded Corners, graphs, advanced typography )

Also 'dated' could be interpreted as 'tried, tested and feature complete'

and thanks for point out sIFR - something i'm going to look at later, i already have a list of things to explore with it, such as printing? ( html + images can do this pretty well, can sIFR?....)

Answer 4

Same as this StackOverflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/775168/math-equations-on-the-web/

Answer 5

The jsMath package is an option that uses LaTeX markup and native fonts. Quoting from their webpage http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/:

The jsMath package provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of unix. It overcomes a number of the shortcomings of the traditional method of using images to represent mathematics: jsMath uses native fonts, so they resize when you change the size of the text in your browser, they print at the full resolution of your printer, and you don't have to wait for dozens of images to be downloaded in order to see the mathematics in a web page. There are also advantages for web-page authors, as there is no need to preprocess your web pages to generate any images, and the mathematics is entered in TeX form, so it is easy to create and maintain your web pages.

See for example this page or that one.

Answer 6

MathTran is the nicest solution that I've come across to this:

http://www.mathtran.org/

Answer 7

I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output.

Answer 8

The solution is to use http://www.codecogs.com/components/equationeditor/equationeditor.php

The website allow you to type your equation in LaTeX format and using its TeX Server, it will convert the equation to images and you will be able to show your math equation there.

let me show you an example, suppose i want print a integration formula i just type:

img style="display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" title=" \int_{a}^{b}(x+2)dx " src="http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\int_{a}^{b}(x+2)dx"

Refer to the 3rd of the code above, the LaTex Math Equation is inserted after the question mark in src=”http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?[put your TeX Code here]”