Sphinx LaTeX woes

Posted Oct 27, 2016 16:27 UTC (Thu) by mchehab (subscriber, #41156)
In reply to: Sphinx LaTeX woes by jnareb
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

> Or you can use `texliveonfly` package / tool that implements on demand installation in TeX Live 2010 and later.

Sounds promissing! will do some tests here.

> Are not there tools that allow conversion of LaTeX math syntax (e.g. $$z^2 = x^2 + y^2$$) to MathML without requiring LaTeX? There might be a problem with image fallback, but one could use plain text (LaTeX math syntax or ASCIImath) instead.

There is a MathML extension. We didn't test yet. Not sure what dependencies it would require, nor if it will work for all kinds of document outputs (HTML, ePub and LaTeX/PDF) that the documentation build supports.

> Also there are JavaScript-based solutions like MathJax and/or KaTeX, with math rendered client-side.

The problem is that Spinx accepts just *one* extension to handle math:: tags. So, it should be either sphinx.ext.imgmath or sphinx.ext.mathjax. (http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.4.8/ext/math.html). So, if we move to mathjax, PDF output will likely not work anymore. Maybe with some Python magic we could find a way to make Sphinx conf.py to identify the type of output and switch the extension in runtime. It also seems that the MathJax extension requires an extra package to be installed.