MathJax-node

One bit of irony: LaTeX.css can't display math without... JS. (However, there is a solution if you're using Pandoc! Compile via texmath and then https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node can create a static HTML+CSS+fonts page, which aside from looking the same, runs far faster than loading Mathjax. This is what I do on gwern.net. It's very nice. texmath doesn't support all of LaTeX, of course, but if you need a block or a diagram, there's lots of Pandoc plugins to call a TeX install of some sort and generate an SVG or PNG.)

You say that like it's a bad thing! But the TeX math is interesting to discuss: it turns out that you can skip the usual multi-second download/parse/render/reflow workflow of MathJax JS libraries on a static website by preprocessing the final HTML pages using https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node . This gets you pretty much the best of all worlds: it renders instantly without JS, looks good, works cross-browser, and is dead-simple to set up as you just pipe into a tool. Definitely the best way I've found for static sites to render math.

We tried using KaTeX for https://www.arxiv-vanity.com but unfortunately it doesn’t support a lot of commonly used stuff. I forget what most of that was now... over/underbrace is one I recall. In the end we used MathJax pre-rendered on the server, which is the same speed as pre-rendered KaTeX: https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node We’ve also done lots of tweaking to make it support as much stuff on the arXiv as possible. Our MathJax config is a fun read: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/blob/master/src/conv...

Maybe that could be addressed via a plugin and use of https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node on the backend. I spent the last month writing https://cocalc.com/share/, which generates mathematics-heavy user content 100% on the backend, using MathJax-node; it's definitely a bit painful, but seems to work reasonably well.