From 07bf43a314fe65ccd9c7cb663c3c6134a47cc269 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Zhiming Wang Date: Mon, 4 May 2015 18:45:17 -0700 Subject: edit posts and (mostly) figured out the theme Also wrote pyblog that currently can generate parts most of the blog. --- source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'source/blog/2014-11-24-why-i-abandoned-mathjax-and-fell-back-to-pdf.md') 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 2d2781e6..be8185fc 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 @@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "Why I abandoned MathJax and fell back to PDF" date: 2014-11-24 20:54:36 -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/). 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*](/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. 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. -- cgit v1.2.1