FEATURE
Mathematics
Fulfi lling the potential of maths online
Hylke Koers describes an open-source project that aims to simplify and enhance the experience of publishing and using mathematical formulae online
straightforward. Mathematical expressions are a key building block for scientifi c communication on the web, yet a good technology to display these across viewing devices has been lacking so far. The traditional solution for
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reading and writing mathematics on the web is to use images of the equations and link those into the page to represent the mathematics. This is a cumbersome approach that has a number of drawbacks: images do not display well at large zoom, do not print at full resolution, and do not consistently align well with the surrounding text. This is particularly problematic on tablets and other mobile viewing devices with small screens. On top of that, images of equations cannot readily be interpreted by other software and are thus hardly an adequate representation of mathematical knowledge on the web. The Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) was intended to solve this problem, but native browser support for MathML is still very limited. A new project, called MathJax, aims to bridge this gap by bringing MathML support to all modern browsers, making it possible for publishers to fi nally take full advantage of the MathML standard.
Introducing MathJax The MathJax project was initiated in 2009 by the American Mathematical Society (AMS), Design Science, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). MathJax grew out of the popular jsMath, an earlier maths rendering system for LaTeX developed by Davide Cervone in 2004. In the intervening time, there
24 Research Information OCT/NOV 2011
nybody involved in publishing or reading mathematical formulae online will know that this is not always
interact with other applications and environments. Its goal is to provide high-quality, consistent display of mathematics in all major browsers and mobile viewing devices without plugins or other special set-up requirements, as well as an interface to allow users to copy maths to the clipboard so they can use it in other applications (for example, calculation or visualisation tools). An extensible, modular
design with a rich API for easy integration into web applications is also important. This provides the infrastructure to make online mathematics machine-
have been many signifi cant developments relevant for web publication of mathematics. These included consolidation of browser support for CSS 2.1, Web Font technology, adoption of math accessibility standards, and increasing usage of XML workfl ows for scientifi c publication. In 2007, a discussion following from a chance meeting at an NSF-sponsored workshop between people associated with DSI and SIAM led to the idea of a project with institutional support to further develop the ideas introduced by jsMath using newer technology. In 2008, MathJax was organised as a joint project, with AMS, DSI and SIAM providing major support and project oversight. Davide Cervone was engaged to lead the development, and work began to design and develop MathJax from the ground up as a “next- generation platform”. Soon several other organisations began providing additional support to the project, and a website was launched. A prototype of MathJax was unveiled in 2009 and the initial 1.0 release was in 2010. MathJax aims to be a universal, standards-
based ‘maths on the web’ solution that displays mathematics beautifully, and also allows it to
interpretable, which can be used for advanced functionality such as maths search engines. Another feature of MathJax is that it aims to improve the accessibility of online mathematics for readers with print disabilities. The ability to scale all maths in a page or zoom in on a particular equation, are built in to MathJax. In addition, MathJax works with programs like MathPlayer to make maths accessible to screen readers, to screen magnifi ers, and to learning disability software.
How it works When MathJax is called from a webpage, it looks through that page to search for mathematical expressions in either MathML or LaTeX format. When it fi nds such an expression, MathJax interprets it and determines the glyphs that are needed for display. MathJax then collects the necessary fonts and typesets the expression in the browser. Because the rendering is done dynamically and with scalable fonts, the mathematics is well integrated into the surrounding text – with matching size, baseline, and margins at all levels of zoom. In most cases, MathJax will fetch the required
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