[tex4ht] issue with raw html output with httex

[Patrice Dumas]

Hello,

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 01:57:43AM -0700, William F Hammond wrote:
> It's always easier to look at an example.
> 
> I've played with it a bit and used "makeinfo", then manually linked to
> MathJax.  That is,
> 
>       makeinfo  -- html  -o foo  foo.texi
> 
> Modified texinfo source attached.

Ok.  Indeed, we can always use TeX/LaTeX only in math.  The reason why
we may be interested in using @-commands is for the output to other
formats which do not have images nor free placement of the text.  The
main format concerned is Info, which can be read on a terminal.

> Maybe Karl can create a mathjax option to makeinfo.  

The Texinfo maintainer is now Gavin Smith, and he actually implemented a
MathJax option for math rendering in the HTML output recently, very
similar to what you propose.  It is only available in the development
version, not in any release for now.  It gives nice results but also has
some disavantages, such as relying on a dynamic code, or not offering
offline browsing, which is not the case when using tex4ht or latex2html.

> It looks to me as if
> the math in HTML is now being written to work in a terminal window browser
> using pseudo-TeX.

As I said above, it partly is.  We indeed want to produce, from Texinfo,
content suitable for reading on a terminal through the Info format, but
also books, as well as HTML (and other).  The constraints and capacities
of those different formats are quite different.  Mixing @-commands and
TeX/LaTeX format is a kind of compromise for the formats.

The documentation of the previous release gives a description:
https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Inserting-Math.html

However, now that we are moving towards proper expansion of TeX/LaTeX
math in HTML, using either tex4ht, mathjax or latex2html, we will change
the documentations, and the recommendation to be more like what you
propose, that is consistently use TeX/LaTeX in @math and in the new
@-command @displaymath, and use httex for @math expansion in the tex4ht
case too, in the default case.

-- 
Pat