Professional looking equations by rendering LaTeX online

Typesetting mathematical expressions in a digital document has always been tricky, specially, when dealing with the complex equations that commonly arise in the different domains of research in Physics and Math. Over the years several approaches were developed, and while some emphasized more the ease of use at the cost of power (like Microsoft’s Equation Editor), others focused on bleeding edge power, but with a steep learning curve (like TeX or LaTeX). Not surprisingly, most people can make due with the limited functionality of MS Equation Editor and only people in very technical fields which require the constant use of mathematical expressions use LaTeX.

With the coming of age of the Internet and the World Wide Web, this problem, which had pretty much been solved in the Desktop world, resurfaced. A completely new Markup Language, MathML, was introduced to try and solve it, but without much support from the leading browsers and web developers it never really took off. Recently, ways of porting the power of LaTeX to the online world have been developed with two different concepts taking the lead.

1. mimeTeX, is a CGI “script” written in C that implements LaTeX’s mathematical notation and quickly generates good quality gif images of complex expressions.
2. LaTeXRender, is a set of scripts that invoke LaTeX itself in the background to generate very high quality images of arbitrarily complex formulas.

Both of these solve the browser compatibility issues in a similar fashion, by simply generating images that are easily understood by even the simplest graphical Internet browsers, and plugin versions of both have been developed for various Blog and CMS softwares. Generating images, also has the advantage of being able to use them in other contexts, such as presentations and other types of documents. However, each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. mimeTex is very fast, but with less than perfect quality, and LaTeXRender achieves perfect quality but is considerably slower. LaTeXRender uses a cach to avoid having to rerender the same expression repeatedly, but the overhead is still present with all new expressions.

Ideally, one would like to have the power of LaTeXRender and the speed of mimeTeX combined. Here (http://www.bgoncalves.com/online/latex/), tried to create such a beast using some javascript-fu to unite both softwares. As you type your LaTeX expression, mimeTeX instantaneously updates the “Preview” image to reflect your changes. The table on top lets you add commonly used symbols and expressions without even needing to know the corresponding LaTeX command. Simply click one of the symbols, and the appropriate code will be added to your expression. Finally, when you are satisfied with your equation, press the “Send Query” button to have LaTeXRender create you the perfect image representation of your expression that you can use with any software that is able to accept figures. I commonly use it to generate the expressions in my PowerPoint presentations.