TeXZilla at AMO

Published on January 28, 2014.

Note: This post was update in January 29th base on Frédéric’s comments.

TeXZilla is the name of one (La)TeX to MathML parser write in Javascript and the name of one Mozilla Add-ons that use the Javascript parse. Both was written by Frédéric Wang and are under Mozilla Public License.

In this post I will review the Add-ons.

Install

Install the Add-ons is very easy, just go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/texzilla/ and click in “Add to Firefox”.

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You will see one warning since this Add-ons wasn’t review by Mozilla. If you are OK with that, the plugin will be installed and one icon be add on the top right corner.

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First impression

If you click on TeXZilla icon it will create a new tab.

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The are some examples of formulas in the third drop-down list. You can choose one of them and the some text will be insert in the text box and the MathML representation below.

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You can edit the text in the text box and press “TAB”. The MathML representation will be update.

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The first issue that I found is related with error in (La)TEX since the information don’t help very much (but I know that write this kind of information is boring the issue #16 have more information about it).

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Matrix

I what to try linear algebra equations, but let’s start with just some subscripts.

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As you can see in the picture above, it’s not compatible with (La)TeX since for (La)TeX a_11 is equals to a_{1}1 that is different from a_{11}. This should be fixed with issue #13.

It work properly with \mathrm, \text, and \operatorname. If want to know the difference between them, read this question at tex.stackexchange.com.

For matrices you can use the matrix and pmatrix environment (that came from amsmath package).

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But it not support bmatrix environment (don’t know why) The picture above is out-of-date since I send a patch to fix the problem with bmatrix.

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More tests

It support the cases environment (that’s great) but need some improvements handle \text (Frédéric “wonders whether TeXZilla should convert the space in the token elements into non-break space”).

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It don’t support the align environment neither breaking line (but this is OK since Firefox don’t fully support MathML yet) Frédéric used itex2MML as reference and it support aligned that is similar to align, both from amsmath package, but to use only inside math environments. TeXZilla also support others environments from amsmath package.

Conclusions

It’s a great plugin that enables the user test MathML and I hope get more people involved.

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