I am new to Observable, and find it not only very intuitive to use but also suitable to almost my everyday experiments on the Web. In addition, it is also comfortable for me to write notes on Observable, some of which contains mathematics formulas. In Observable standard library, there is a template literal, tex
, that can be used to typeset some LaTeX expression powered by KaTeX. KaTeX is extremely fast to render beautiful math formulas, but I often write formulas and find KaTeX does not support it (yet). An alternative package that most mathematics website use is MathJax, and I personally use it whenever available. Here is my attempt to make MathJax work in an Observable notebook:
Some caveats are:
- MathJax is not a regular module AFAIK. I have to suppress the “invalid module” error and use its injected variable
MathJax
in thecatch
block. - It seems that the trailing
config=TeX-AMS_CHTML
is mandatory. That’s why I load the JS file via an URL. Not using unpkg because it often timeouts or generates 503.
- It is not reactive, which means if you edit and save a cell, it will not get transformed. Maybe I need to roll up a template literal by myself to hook the typeset process after output.
- In this notebook, I write mathematics strings along with markdown contents. This is OK when there is only HTML cells, but is not ideal in other cases, for instance, some tokens used in LaTeX may conflict to Markdown syntax. I am trying combining it with a tokenizer.
I am not very familiar to techniques of Observable, so I kindly ask for recommendations for improvements on this notebook on its usability. Thanks!