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| -rw-r--r-- | source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md | 2 |
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diff --git a/source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md b/source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md index 8ff1b6b6..43ce2b76 100644 --- a/source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md +++ b/source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ date: 2014-11-24T20:54:36-0800 date_display: November 24, 2014 --- -Recently I wrote an expository article, [*Convolution of irreducible characters*](/pdf/20141119-convolution-of-irreducible-characters.pdf), and posted it [here](/blog/2014-11-19-convolution-of-irreducible-characters.html). At first I intended to use MathJax, but in the end I fell back to good ol' PDF. Here's why. +Recently I wrote an expository article, [*Convolution of irreducible characters*](https://dl.bintray.com/zmwangx/generic/20141119-convolution-of-irreducible-characters.pdf), and posted it [here](/blog/2014-11-19-convolution-of-irreducible-characters.html). At first I intended to use MathJax, but in the end I fell back to good ol' PDF. Here's why. In short, I'm a mathematician. I write math *articles*, not just standalone expressions or formulas. I use AMSLaTeX to its fullest (not really, but at least I use numbering and the `amsthm` package to its fullest). HTML simply wasn't designed for this. Here are two influential markup languages designed for totally different use cases, and bridging them is painful. I tried to use `pandoc`, but it doesn't support `\input`, doesn't support `\def`, and swallows `\begin{theorem} \end{theorem}`, among other things. I tried to use `htlatex`; even the MathML output is suboptimal, with many math symbols translated to non-math (apart from totally human-unreadable), and it uses its custom CSS files that don't play well with everything else. I tried other things. In the end I gave up. Maybe I don't know enough about MathJax, but I certainly don't want to write a translator myself. Leave LaTeX alone. Distribute as PDF. MathJax may be great for Wikis (like Wikipedia) and for math lite blogs, but it's no replacement for real, beefy LaTeX. It's not for mathematicians who want to distribute real articles. |