KeenType VS KaTeX

> modern languages like Markdown

Markdown was created in 2004. From the creator:

> ... the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

Email goes back to 1965, though I suspect Markdown's influence stems from the more widely adopted email usage from the 1990s.

> Part of LaTeX's success was the absolutely beautiful documents it can make with nothing but a personal computer.

I'd say that was TeX's success, with LaTeX bolted on later to greatly improve TeX's extensibility. Keep in mind, there are a number of TeX-centric implementations beyond LaTeX. For example, my fork of NTS, called KeenType, is a pure Java version of TeX that can typeset beautifully and has at its core Knuth's original TeX files.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/tree/main/tex/src/mai...

My port of the New Typesetting System (NTS), called KeenType, whittles down the Java-based implementation to a few of Knuth's files. Namely, "plain.tex" and "hyphen.tex":

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/tree/main/tex/src/mai...

Getting familiar with the fonts required understanding the difference between font metrics (TFM files) and the fonts themselves. To make matters a little less straightforward, Knuth created a special character mapping for indexes into the fonts. It was not easy to find a font that mapped those glyphs exactly. The closest font was BaKoMa:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/tree/main/tex/src/mai...

This required hard-coding a mapping between Knuth's code points and the actual code points in the target font:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/blob/989dbe26f68eda75...

A while ago I optimized KeenType, which although not JavaScript-based, generates SVG images, which can be embedded into web pages.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keentype

The following tutorial shows the real-time rendering speed of KeenType within my text editor, KeenWrite:

https://youtu.be/vgyYXwwF_lc?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...

In Java, many number-to-string implementations use NumberFormat. This is abysmally slow if the problem domain doesn't require internationalization, which is the case for machine-readable file formats, such as SVG. When I performance tested JMathTeX for rendering TeX, the bottleneck for converting TeX into SVG elements was JFreeSVG's use of NumberFormat[0]. Replacing NumberFormat with RyuDouble doubled the throughput[1]. (Reusing a StringBuilder for to concatenate strings yielded another doubling.)

For KeenType[2], a fork of the New Typesetting System (and more complete TeX implementation than JMathTeX), I added an SVG generator that converts numbers to string using a StackOverflow answer[3], instead of using Ryu[4]. The performance was even better and the algorithm vastly simpler.

Knuth was right: measure, then optimize.

[0]: https://github.com/jfree/jfreesvg

[1]: https://github.com/jfree/jfreesvg/pull/30

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType

[3]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10554128/59087

[4]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/blob/fef005579021f394...

KeenType, a modernized and optimized NTS fork, replaces KeenTeX.

I want to resolve this KaTeX issue, so in order to test my ideas, is there some LaTeX test file with just a lot of equations, preferably inline (since this issue is related to inline math) but without fancy libraries or stuff not included in KaTeX?

> Could you elaborate on why you switched away from it?

I started using KaTeX sometime after 2015 because it promised to be fast (the fastest! [1]). I had to change the representation of a bunch of expressions because KaTeX didn't support some environments, whilst MathJax did. It was a trade-off I was willing to accept at the time.

Many years later, I started writing a personal static-site generator. I wanted comparatively lightweight pages, so rendering server-side was an option. I re-evaluated MathJax vs KaTeX again and this time I leaned towards MathJax, as speed was no longer an issue for me. It looks like KaTeX has broader support now [2].

[1] https://katex.org

[2] https://katex.org/docs/support_table.html

Another alternative: Create a WebView by using UIViewRepresentable and Webkit together with MathJax or Katex where Katex is the better option. Here is a link to katex: https://katex.org/

This isn't a LaTeX question. It's a web dev question. Probably best directed at folks who make (or use) KaTeX.

KaTeX

(1) [https://katex.org/

If you want to make it from scratch, go with https://www.slatejs.org/examples/richtext, then use something like https://katex.org/ for rendering the LaTeX, and maybe Mathjs.org for plotting.

The speed of KaTeX is great, but the lack of support for diagrams (a la tikz-cd) is what makes KaTeX unsuitable for general adoption by mathematicians (e.g., mathoverflow.net and all online mathematical wiki I know use MathJax). KaTeX has some rudimentary support for diagrams though the {CD} environment, but something more fully fledged akin to tizk-cd or xymatrix is needed. There's been some discussion on their github (https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX/issues/219), but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Haven't personally used it, but have heard of KaTeX