This Engineering Notebook post completes my retrospective of Knuth's TeX system and summarizes my study of MathJax <https://www.mathjax.org/>. I am writing this post so that I can move on to other projects.
*About MathJax* I was mainly curious about how MathJax works. The wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax>summarizes MathJax well: 1. MathJax is nothing but embedded javascript. 2. "MathJax is meant only for math display, whereas LaTeX is a document layout language, MathJax only supports the subset of LaTeX used to describe mathematical notation." As a result, MathJax has a *relatively* small size. Confusingly, there are separate GitHub repositories for MathJax deliverables <https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax> and MathJax sources <https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-src>. Most MathJax sources are in typescript. The 3.0 docs are incomplete. The 2.0 API docs <https://docs.mathjax.org/en/stable/api/index.html> provide all I want to know. There are front ends (input code) for TeX and MathML and back ends (output code) for svg, etc. Front ends convert user input to a tree. Back ends convert the tree to their respective output formats. This design is straightforward and needs little detailed documentation. *About TeX* The sources for TeX (web.tex) are here <https://mirror.las.iastate.edu/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex/tex.web>. The typeset (woven) version of web.tex is here <https://mirror.las.iastate.edu/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex/tex.web>. The web-to-outline script (in scripts.leo) converts web.tex to an outline. Imo, neither outlines nor typesetting could compensate for pascal's deficiencies. That's all I want to say about the program whose *problems* helped create Leo. *About typesetting* Imo, typesetting markup will always obscure documentation. Yes, one would prefer to see the rendered form of equations. The VR3 can render those equations, so nothing extra seems necessary. *Summary* Any day without typesetting is a good day. I have no further interest in TeX, MathJax, or typesetting. It's time to move on. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/5752a607-922d-466a-8ef5-38abb9a2a056n%40googlegroups.com.
