Dynamic Preview of MathJax

by Emma Joe Anderson

Minimal instant pretty math. TL;DR

Update. There's also Mathcha and Mathquill if you'd prefer to not edit LaTeX directly.

Who

If you're someone who wants a fast way to type pretty math:

  • to take short notes
  • to discuss via a screen share
  • to test sections of LaTeX code (for practice or debugging)

What

I've long used a MathJax previewer while tutoring to type LaTeX and have it live-generate pretty math for my student to view over a screen share. I've had to alternate between using these two sites:

because occasionally one would go down and I'd swap to the other.

(Aside: Unending thanks to those being up and searchable on Google so that I could use them for the past six years.)

However, I'm now done with that. I've copied the minimally necessary html and js from the Official Page to my own webpage. It works faster than the others (I imagine because it uses the cdn rather than hosting MathJax on the university servers) and displays useful error messages (thanks to the official page).

I modified the preview to be at a "larger" font size, relative to the LaTeX input. That's because, with that larger font size and minimum window width, I tend to like the way the resulting output looks. (That centered math doesn't look lost in the html <p> text around it.) But I still want to be able to read a lot of input code all at once.

If you need it to fill a wider window, just use ctrl-+ to increase the font size. If you dislike the relative larger font, use a greasemonkey script or download and host your own version of the html and js. (I like the minimal window width since I use OBS to share multiple windows at once, such as Desmos and Sketchpad, as well as to apply a filter that crops out the part of the window where my LaTeX is. So screen space is valuable real estate.)

Next Steps

I want to be able to pop out the output into a separate window, so I won't need OBS to be able to screen share just the output. (Would be particularly useful on my Chromebook. Also for using ctrl-alt-PrtSc to screenshot just the output.)