TeX is Still Around!
Once upon a time, I was really into TeX: I used to spend all my free time (and more…) visiting newsgroups, testing, writing and translating documents, and now, I have totally left all that behind – unfortunately.
And now I am so out of touch that it is by reading Simon Willison’s Weblog that I learn that Wikipedia runs TeX for formulae. Simon is a WikiLover, and I guess there are hundreds of thousands other out there, including myself: you can spend so much time on this site when you have nothing to do at work! But, I didn’t know that…
Unfortunately, the rendering as PNGs is almost as dodgy as it was when using latex2html, partly because the figures are made so big. The way of writing systems of equations (alternative way) is also messy, mixing TeX and <math> markup. And the use of mbox is recommanded whereas it would make more sense to find a way to insert HTML right there – even though positioning could be a nightmare. Good news is that they have included packages such as those provided by the AMS: thanks to that, almost any formula can be written. That’s so WikiCool!
