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 third 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 nearly all the extensions are now available in v3.
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.
What’s New
This release fixes a number of display issues with the SVG output (see #153, #156, #157, #137) and improves the output for nested tables, particularly those with labels and those with percentage widths, in both CommonHTML and SVG output. Problems with table lines in SVG output in Safari and IE were fixed as well.
The TeX input has been updated to include nearly all the extensions that were available in v2, including the color, action, unicode, bbox, html, and several other extensions. These are all included in the webpacked files available in the demos repository (listed below), although the color extension is not enabled by default in order to preserve the behavior of \color in version 2 (this will probably change in the official release of v3).
In addition, there were some changes internally to how the MathDocument and MathItem classes, and the Handler class now allows more flexibility in overriding these. These changes are needed to better support extensions that may need to subclass the document and math-item classes. The next release will formalize the extension mechanisms and will include examples of how extensions will operate.
Finally, the TeX-lab.html and MML-lab.html files have been merged into a single v3-lab.html, and the original files removed. This late allows you to experiment will both input and both output formats, as well as enable/disable each of the extensions individual.
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!