Consider moving to Katex

[Techcable]

Hi! Have you considered moving to Katex for your math rendering?

It's faster than MathJax and much more lightweight.

I'd be willing to help port this if you're interested 😄

[mmatera]

I think it worth a try. Do you think this would requiere many changes?

[TiagoCavalcante]

@mmatera @Techcable currently the "interface" uses XML a lot. MathJax is XML and in the middle of MathJax there are SVGs, images and 3d graphics. But except for these exceptions, it [probably] won't be hard. Katex uses LaTeX, and Mathics produces LaTeX.

Also, I love the idea of using Katex instead of MathJax, Mathics Django formulas take too much to render and don't look good on every screen (a thing that Katex does).

[Techcable]

Yeah I figured it might be a good way to start contributing to the code base. I wanna help make this run faster :)

[TiagoCavalcante]

Here MathMLForm needs to be replaced with TeXForm. We also need to add a tag around the LaTeX commands (I suggest latex) and add 2 more ifs to mathics.js (here and here).

[rocky]

I think it worth a try too.

[rocky]

I should mention something when working with TeXForm. There is a bit of unfinished and incomplete work here. If you look at the mathics scanner project , you will find a in the character tables a number of symbols that have been marked with their AMSLaTeX symbols, for example this one for alpha.

We haven't done a complete job in adding all of the translations in that YAML file yet. Worse, we are not currently using any of this when going to TeXForm.

Not a big deal or conceptually difficult, just a lot of details that haven't been filled in yet.