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Dmitri Pavlov
Dmitri Pavlov
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One of the (many) problems with MathJax is that formulas are rendered using a client-side JavaScript. Apart from the process itself being ridiculously slow, this also means that the entire page must be constantly reflowed, with things moving up and down a few times per second. In my opinion, this is extremely annoying.

There is a server-side version of MathJax: https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node. This server-side version only processes a formula once, after it is submitted to the server. The server can then serve the compiled version (i.e., an HTML file with a CSS style) to the user agent, which can then render the entire page almost instantly, compared to what it takes the client-side MathJax to render it.

Such a setup seems to be much superior to the current situation. Would it be possible to adjust the software accordingly?

Added 2018–3–11: The new version of MathJax-node seems to have full support for the HTML+CSS output. In light of this development, can we now revisit the question of switching to the server-side MathJax?

One of the (many) problems with MathJax is that formulas are rendered using a client-side JavaScript. Apart from the process itself being ridiculously slow, this also means that the entire page must be constantly reflowed, with things moving up and down a few times per second. In my opinion, this is extremely annoying.

There is a server-side version of MathJax: https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node. This server-side version only processes a formula once, after it is submitted to the server. The server can then serve the compiled version to the user agent, which can then render the entire page almost instantly, compared to what it takes the client-side MathJax to render it.

Such a setup seems to be much superior to the current situation. Would it be possible to adjust the software accordingly?

One of the (many) problems with MathJax is that formulas are rendered using a client-side JavaScript. Apart from the process itself being ridiculously slow, this also means that the entire page must be constantly reflowed, with things moving up and down a few times per second. In my opinion, this is extremely annoying.

There is a server-side version of MathJax: https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node. This server-side version only processes a formula once, after it is submitted to the server. The server can then serve the compiled version (i.e., an HTML file with a CSS style) to the user agent, which can then render the entire page almost instantly, compared to what it takes the client-side MathJax to render it.

Such a setup seems to be much superior to the current situation. Would it be possible to adjust the software accordingly?

Added 2018–3–11: The new version of MathJax-node seems to have full support for the HTML+CSS output. In light of this development, can we now revisit the question of switching to the server-side MathJax?

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Dmitri Pavlov
Dmitri Pavlov
  • 37.8k
  • 21
  • 19

Can we replace client-side MathJax with server-side MathJax?

One of the (many) problems with MathJax is that formulas are rendered using a client-side JavaScript. Apart from the process itself being ridiculously slow, this also means that the entire page must be constantly reflowed, with things moving up and down a few times per second. In my opinion, this is extremely annoying.

There is a server-side version of MathJax: https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node. This server-side version only processes a formula once, after it is submitted to the server. The server can then serve the compiled version to the user agent, which can then render the entire page almost instantly, compared to what it takes the client-side MathJax to render it.

Such a setup seems to be much superior to the current situation. Would it be possible to adjust the software accordingly?