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MathJax v4.0.0-beta.7

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@dpvc dpvc released this 25 Jul 21:03
· 80 commits to develop since this release
4.0.0-beta.7
267bc5e

This release is primarily a bug-fix release. In particular, the redesign of the way speech is computed and attached to MathJax’s output that was part of the beta.6 release introduced a performance degradation that needed to be addressed. The main purpose of the beta.7 release is to fix that performance problem. In addition, there are also fixes to allow table columns to shrink when their contents have line-breaks, and to allow in-line breaking to work properly in Safari. The computations for the bounding boxes of the layouts in the bussproofs TeX package have been improved. A security issue involving the potential for users being able to insert CSS styles into MathJax equations was identified by the GitHub security team, and is addressed here. The all-packages extension and corresponding AllPackages.ts file and the tex-full component that used them have been removed. Finally, font extension can now be generic extensions so that they work with any base font, and the bbm, bboldx, and dsfonts packages have been rebuilt to be generic font extensions.

Performance Update

The changes made to the speech computations in v4.0.0-beta.6 caused a performance degradation that causes pages to typeset visibly slower than earlier versions. In particular, the lazy-typesetting extension was noticeably affected. In order to address this, MathJax v4.0.0-beta.7 puts off doing the speech computation until after the visual mathematics has been displayed, which restores the original performance. To do this, the speech is computed and attached a few equations at a time, with slight delays in between in order to allow the browser to perform screen updates and scrolling for other user interaction. There are new configuration parameters that control the timing of this operation:

MathJax = {
  options: {
    speechTiming: {
        asynchronous: true,                // true to allow screen updates while adding speech, false to not
        initial: 100,                      // initial delay (in milliseconds) until starting to add speech
        threshold: 250,                    // time (in milliseconds) to process speech before letting screen update
        intermediate: 10                   // delay (in milliseconds) after processing speech reaches the threshold
    }
  }
};

When the options.speechTiming.asynchronous value is true, speech will be added a little at a time. The options.speechTiming.initial value is the delay (in milliseconds) to wait before starting to add speech, the threshold value indicates how long MathJax should work on speech before allowing the screen to update again, and intermediate is how long to wait after that before starting to compute speech again.

If options.speechTiming.asynchronous value is false, then speech is added to the expressions immediately when they are typeset. This can be useful for node applications that run on the server, and don't need to wait for screen updates (as there is no screen to update).

Removal of AllPackages

The AllPackages.ts file was intended as a means of loading most of the TeX extensions up front so that you did not need to worry about asynchronous loading of extensions via the autoload package. But now that MathJax's output is also asynchronous, using AllPackages is no longer sufficient to allow for synchronous processing. As more extensions have been created, they have not all been added to AllPackages.ts, and as the library of extensions, both core and third-party, grows, it is impractical to keep all of them in one package. So in this release, these files have been removed. For those using MathJax in node applications, you can use

import {source} from 'mathjax-full/components/src/source.js';
const AllPackages = Object.keys(source).filter((name) => name.substring(0,6) === '[tex]/').sort();

to get a list of the main TeX packages. For use on the web, you could use

<script type="importmap">
{
  "imports": {
    "#source/source.cjs": "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax-full@4.0.0-beta.7/components/mjs/source-lab.js"
  }
}
</script>
<script type="module">
import {source} from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax-full@4.0.0-beta.7/components/mjs/source.js';
const load = Object.keys(source).filter((name) => name.substring(0,6) === '[tex]/').sort();
const packages = ['base'].concat(load.map((name) => name.substring(6)));
window.MathJax = {
  loader: {load},
  tex: {packages}
};
</script>

to load all the extensions. Add any other configuration options that you need to the window.MathJax variable.

List of Bug Fixes in this Release

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