The MathJax team has been working hard on a major rewrite of MathJax from the ground up, with the goal of modernizing MathJax’s internal infrastructure, bringing it more flexibility for use with contemporary web technologies, making it easier to use with NodeJS for pre-processing and server-side support, and making it faster to render your mathematics. We have made headway in all these areas and we are pleased to announce the second public beta release of MathJax v3.
Where to Find the Beta Release
The code for the release is available in the beta branch of the MathJax v3 github repository.
Examples of how to use MathJax v3 in web pages are available in the mj3-demos repository. This includes several pre-packaged versions of MathJax for common use cases (e.g., converting TeX to HTML in a web page) that you can link to for your own test pages, along with sample HTML pages that call them and documentation on how to configure MathJax v3. There are also instructions on how to make your own custom webpacked version of MathJax v3.
Examples of how to use MathJax v3 in NodeJS are available in the mj3-demos-node repository. These include samples of how to convert a TeX string to an HTML string, an SVG string, or a MathML string, for example, or how to process a complete HTML page containing math.
What’s Included in MathJax v3
This beta version includes two input processors (TeX and MathML) and two output processors (CommonHTML and SVG). Other input and output processors (e.g., AsciiMath input) will be added in the future.
The current TeX input processor has all the core functionality of the MathJax v2 TeX input, and several of the extensions built in, but some extensions are still to come. For example, \unicode, \bbox, and the color extension are not yet available.
The CommonHTML and SVG output implement all the MathML elements that they do in v2, but do not yet include support for line breaking (neither automatic nor explicit ones); this will be implemented in a later beta version. Both output renderers currently only support the MathJax TeX font; other fonts will be added in the future.
The CommonHTML output currently uses a very large CSS file that encodes the font information needed for all the characters in the MathJax TeX fonts. This is a preliminary implementation of the font support, which will be updated to reduce the size of the CSS in future versions.
The SVG output currently uses explicit SVG <path> elements for the characters it displays, whereas version 2 cached the paths in a common SVG <defs> element so that paths didn’t have to be repeated in the individual expressions that used them. This will be implemented in a future version.
The MathJax contextual menu is not yet implemented.
The ability to customize MathJax through a configuration object, as in v2, is limited at the moment, but see the mj3-demos repository for examples of how this can be done currently. In version 3, this type of customization is handled through building custom packed versions of MathJax, and that is not yet fully documented; again, the demo repository includes examples.
NOTE
Mathjax v3 is in beta release. Do not use this in production, but please test it and report issues on the MathJax v3 issue tracker!
We are continuing to add more functionality to version 3, and will be releasing additional beta versions as new features become available. So watch this site for more news to come!