## 01 September 2010

### Trying out jsMath

$$\left(\, \sum_{k=1}^n a_k b_k \right)^2 \le \left(\, \sum_{k=1}^n a_k^2 \right) \left(\, \sum_{k=1}^n b_k^2 \right)$$

Well, that was pretty easy.

Next, I went looked in the tests directory and copied some lines out the test file:

Next I went to the html view of the template for my blog and I put those lines at the start of the document body and pointed the paths at my install of jsMath (in a web accessible directory). Next, I put the following lines at the very bottom of the document body:

According to the install instructions there are variations on this that should work, but I couldn't get them to work satisfactorily.

In later posts maybe I'll play with some of the plugins.

1. To me (Chrome on Windows) it looks like it failed to resize characters. There are normal-text-sized parentheses at the top, inside but a little bit below are sigmas, and about 1ex below that the rest of the formula appears fine.

2. As soon as I commented it fixed itself. Huh.

3. It seems to be some caching/timing issue. I saw the same thing on first load, and reloading fixed it.

4. MathJax -- the successor to jsMath was released recently: http://www.mathjax.org/

5. Mike, thanks for the link. Can you tell me why I would prefer mathjax over jsMath?

From my perspective getting jsMath installed and setup was more straight forward. Otherwise I couldn't really tell a difference between the two when I compared them.

Thanks!