Equation Editing & MathML

If you who have ever tried to use MathML for displaying equations on the web you will have no doubt run into the interesting challenges of browser support. In Internet Explorer, there are all sorts of nasty issues associated with MIME types and doctypes in order to get things to work. And Apple's Safari doesn't work at all. Does your browser support it? Try this.

Given all of these hassles you have probably had the debate about whether you should display MathML or simply  render your equation as an image/flash object/applet etc.

As this is a common issue that we have had users of our Ephox WebEQ Equation Editor, I thought I would drop a hint on how to get your equations rendered and saved into your content as images at author-time instead of at run-time.

We have a simple flag in our configuration file which will save the equations as images instead of the full MathML. Just add this to the <mediaSettings> element in the config file:

<mediaSettings> <mathml createEquationImage="true" /> </mediaSettings>

You may also want to read the Equation Editor Integration chapter of our SDK too.

The benefit of this approach is that you don't require any extra infrastructure for displaying your equations. The downside is that you aren't being all that standards-compliant and if you need to do any post processing on the MathML you have to do a little work to get the encoded MathML, unencode and parse it. But compared to the hassle and expense of the extra infrastructure this nice simple flag might be all you need!

(Note: for this to work you will also need to properly configured the uploading of local images.)