[tjl]

Markdown (even this Scholarly Markdown) is a non-starter for me. It doesn't seem to support individual equation numbers for aligned equations. Plus, Scholarly Markdown oddly decided to put them at the beginning of the line rather than after. Why? The equation is more important than the number so it should be first. Plus, it's nice to have the numbers all aligned to the right margin.

You stated about the footnote support being a deal-breaker for many academics, the poor equation support is a deal-breaker for me. Most of what I write is full of equations, especially aligned equations. It's necessary to reference a specific equation that might be on a different page (or far above it on an HTML page).

It looks like Asciidoc has different ways of handling LaTeX equations for non-LaTeX output. It can render a PNG, it can use a Javascript solution, or it can output MathML.

[timtylin]

I really want to address the math support, because I work with a lot of mathematicians, and one of my main goals is to support most of the latex AMS math features we're used to (as much as MathJax can support outputting on the HTML side anyways), and of course that includes aligned equations. In fact one of the first things I did was to figure out how to support multiline equations.

Turns out, you just need to write consecutive expressions one after another. Put ampersands in all these consecutive expressions and ScholarlyMarkdown will turn it into one giant align environment. If there is no ampersands, it generates a gather environment instead.

I apologize for this not being in the documentation. After all, I estimate that it is only about 30% complete. It really is in a dismal state. I originally didn't expect much people to see the site until later this year when I plan to launch it. This will all be rectified eventually, promise!

Here is literally a large align-block example straight out of the thesis that I'm currently busy working on (instead of the documentation). You can inspect the Scholdoc-rendered LaTeX code to see that you can really do align blocks reliably with this syntax.

http://goo.gl/9lErxa

If you output to HTML, it will just turn this same align block into a MathJax-friendly format, and hand it off to MathJax for rendering. This is what it will look like:

http://jsfiddle.net/hzvwa139/3/

Where the equation numbering is place is entirely a non issue. Why? It's not being decided by ScholarlyMarkdown, but by MathJax. Go to the jsFiddle example above and change the line that reads

  TagSide: "left",

To now read

  TagSide: "right",

and you get it now on the left. Scholdoc simply put those default setting there for convenience; you're not tied to it at all.

Why put the number on the left side by default? Think of what happens when you have a long equation, and when you're trying to read it on a narrow screen such as a phone. If the number was on the right, it may very well be cut-off by the screen, forcing you to scroll around to find equations. Sometimes layout decisions that made sense for paper for centuries doesn't make sense for screens.

I should point out that Scholdoc is only using MathJax on the HTML side for consistency; there is no technical reason why it can't use another renderer that understands LaTeX, but so far MathJax is the only one that even comes close to supporting all standard AMS features. Note that MathJax itself does HTML/CSS, MathML, SVG, and PNG (via a node server) output, and is entirely user-configurable.

[tjl]

I still think equation numbers on the left is a mistake. Ideally, for smaller screens it would split across multiple lines. Or, it could choose the positioning based on screen size.

For me, MathJax can't render my equations. I use some techniques to get a vector with an arrow on the bottom. Two commands I used all throughout my thesis are:

  \def \rV#1{\hbox{$#1$\kern-0.38em\lower0.85em\hbox{$\vec{}\,$}}\,}

and

  \def \Vec#1{\hbox{$#1$\kern-1.0em\lower0.4em\hbox{${\scriptstyle \rightarrow }$}}}

These won't work in MathJax (understandably).

[timtylin]

> Ideally, for smaller screens it would split across multiple lines.

C'mon, nobody deserves to be subject to automatic TeX expression breaking. Even careful hand-tuning with help from the breqn package can often look pretty bad.

> Two commands I used all throughout my thesis are:

At the risk of turning this into TeX StackExchange, I just want to point out that these kerning manipulations are entirely possible in MathJax. The problem is that, maddeningly, they chose to have non-math commands like kern and lower work exclusively in math mode, and not outside one like in a hbox. Therefore, if you change your second command to something like this:

  $a \kern-1em\lower0.4em\hbox{$\scriptstyle \rightarrow$}$

then it will work in MathJax. Of course, this would then break in regular TeX because you're not supposed to use kern and lower in math mode. I keep myself sober by remaining optimistic about a potential overhaul in the MathJax latex processing code.

In the meantime, I think we would benefit from a stopgap service that renders these things in an actual TeX engine running on a server into high-res PNG (easy) or SVG (doubtful). There's been quite a resurgence in effort to make latex rendering into a scaleable web service lately. I'd love to collaborate with someone from, say, ShareLaTeX on that, if possible.

[tjl]

That's awfully annoying of MathJax because you need two separate versions of the LaTeX, one for MathJax and another for LaTeX output.

I know that there's dvisvgm for SVG output from DVI. I think there's also a tex2svg. Also, there's LatexRender-ng. So, there's a number of tools for SVG output.