Introducing Math

We are creating an annotation technology that can be used to enrich human knowledge. Today we take another step forward: Hypothes.is now supports math typesetting. You can now place beautifully formatted equations and mathematical symbols into annotations.

To use math in your annotations, simply enclose supported LaTeX commands within enclosing \( .... \) for inline math, or $$ … $$ for display style math. We’ve also added a handy button to the editor to insert the symbols for you:

Math typesetting is provided by a combination of the new KaTeX library and MathJax. KaTeX has the benefits of being lightweight, working for a large portion of math, and rendering extremely fast. The drawback is that it lacks many of the LaTeX commands supported by MathJax. Our implementation loads MathJax if a command is present that KaTeX doesn’t support, and uses that for rendering that particular equation. The combination results in math typesetting that is both very fast and supports a wide variety of math!

We’re excited to see how the addition of math will increase the richness of online commentary and discussion on the annotated Web. We’d like to give a special thank you to Peter Krautzberger at Mathjax, who’s excellent software library and thoughtful advice have been an essential part of this effort.