The fastest math typesetting library for the web

The speed of KaTeX is great, but the lack of support for diagrams (a la tikz-cd) is what makes KaTeX unsuitable for general adoption by mathematicians (e.g., mathoverflow.net and all online mathematical wikis I know use MathJax). KaTeX has some rudimentary support for diagrams though the {CD} environment, but something more fully fledged akin to tizk-cd or xymatrix is needed. There's been some discussion on their github (https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX/issues/219), but I wouldn't hold my breath.

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…

KaTeX is great, but I long for a system that: 1. Can be rendered server-side without a heavy runtime (ideally written in C/C++/Rust/Whatever instead of JS). 2. Has a well defined output AST, so that the output can be manipulated (e.g. realtime visual equation editing). 3. Is accessible to the visually impared. Actually, we have such a system: MathML. And its a W3C standard to boot. The only reason why we have to rely on slow JS hacks like KaTeX…

Does anyone know why Google doesn’t adopt something like this in Google Docs / Slides? It’s amazing to me that after all these years Google Docs still has some of the worst equation editing of all word processors. I was hopeful when they added markdown support that first class equation editing was near, but it’s been a while now and still nothing.