A commenter left this on another HN post [0] and I thought it was worth its own.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45701400

▲ joppy 3 days ago | parent [-]

The commenter says pre-rendered/server-side-rendered mathematics (via katex) is great - I’ve found the opposite. It’s probably great if you have an article with one or two equations. On the other hand, if you have an article which uses mathematics pervasively, like many pure mathematics articles, it quickly becomes far more space efficient to render the mathematics on the client side. You can quickly get 200kB+ pages by pre-rendering.

▲ Galanwe 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

My experience with dynamically rendered math has been the opposite: if you have lots of equations to render, it inevitably takes some milliseconds to render, which makes the whole content move around and shake as rendering takes places.

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ayhanfuat 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed. It was hell to navigate pages that rendered MathJax on demand. That also improved a lot though.

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blenderob 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it inevitably takes some milliseconds to render, which makes the whole content move around and shake as rendering takes places.

What a boldly incorrect comment! It's like you didn't even read the first point in TFA!

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Latitude7973 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you read the article? That's what the KaTeX project specifically claims to address.

	▲	cubefox 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The previous comment was about using KaTeX for pre-rendered equations.

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Vosporos 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not too late to delete this comment.

▲ lifthrasiir 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

KaTeX weighs about the same if you do care about those metrics, however.

	▲	susam 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		In case anyone wants to look at actual numbers about how much KaTeX weighs for a simple mathematics page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614133 Quoting the relevant part from that link: `katex.min.css 23.6 kB katex.min.js 277.0 kB auto-render.min.js 3.7 kB KaTeX_Main-Regular.woff2 26.5 kB KaTeX_Main-Italic.woff2 16.7 kB ---------------------------------- Total Additional 347.5 kB` Of course, if the page uses more symbols in various sizes, then a few more fonts files (.woff2) need to be pulled in which case the weight of KaTeX would increase a bit too. Each font file weighs between 4 kB and 28 kB.

▲ eviks 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But how is better space efficiency at this level better than worse rendering efficiency?

▲ djoldman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could you please provide an example?

▲ adastra22 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is 200kB supposed to be a lot?