Re:Fast Math Rendering on the Web
by wenc on Sunday April 12, 2020 @01:45PM
(#22849804)
> The rendering reminds me of typeset math from the 60s
I'd like to congratulate the author on building something like this. It obviously serves a niche, and represents an approach to that is useful.
That said, there is a trade-off to giving up beautiful math rendering. Aesthetics in math does matter for all but the roughest of jots -- even if you never show your jots to anyone.
When I was in academia, I kept my jots in a single continuous LaTeX file. I was fluent in LaTeX so I could jot down math almost faster than I could write them down on paper (keyboard + LaTeX macros + rapid copy-paste of repeated structures helped -- you wouldn't believe how much time you can save by making say "\sum_i^n\sum_j^m" a macro in index-heavy fields like mine).
I threw snippets and stuff into it, and because it was so beautiful, I would regularly review it and coalesce new ideas from it. Also, for the kind of math I was doing, I needed more symbols and structures than was supported, so I had to pull in packages. But the result was a set of notes that, for me, was pleasant to use. Render time? 3s on avg.
Good typeset is important, even if only psychologically.
I'd like to congratulate the author on building something like this. It obviously serves a niche, and represents an approach to that is useful.
That said, there is a trade-off to giving up beautiful math rendering. Aesthetics in math does matter for all but the roughest of jots -- even if you never show your jots to anyone.
When I was in academia, I kept my jots in a single continuous LaTeX file. I was fluent in LaTeX so I could jot down math almost faster than I could write them down on paper (keyboard + LaTeX macros + rapid copy-paste of repeated structures helped -- you wouldn't believe how much time you can save by making say "\sum_i^n\sum_j^m" a macro in index-heavy fields like mine).
I threw snippets and stuff into it, and because it was so beautiful, I would regularly review it and coalesce new ideas from it. Also, for the kind of math I was doing, I needed more symbols and structures than was supported, so I had to pull in packages. But the result was a set of notes that, for me, was pleasant to use. Render time? 3s on avg.
Good typeset is important, even if only psychologically.