Attention
Version 3 is now the current version of MathJax. This document is for version 2.
Loading MathJax Dynamically¶
MathJax is designed to be included via a <script>
tag in the
<head>
section of your HTML document, and it does rely on being
part of the original document in that it uses an onload
or
DOMContentLoaded
event handler to synchronize its actions with the
loading of the page. If you wish to insert MathJax into a document
after it has been loaded, that will normally occur after the page’s
onload
handler has fired, and prior to version 2.0, MathJax had to
be told not to wait for the page onload
event by calling
MathJax.Hub.Startup.onload()
by hand. That is no longer
necessary, as MathJax v2.0 detects whether the page is already
available and when it is, it processes it immediately rather than
waiting for an event that has already happened.
Here is an example of how to load and configure MathJax dynamically:
(function () {
var script = document.createElement("script");
script.type = "text/javascript";
script.src = "https://example.com/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML";
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
})();
If you need to provide in-line configuration, you can do that using a MathJax’s configuration script:
(function () {
var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0], script;
script = document.createElement("script");
script.type = "text/x-mathjax-config";
script[(window.opera ? "innerHTML" : "text")] =
"MathJax.Hub.Config({\n" +
" tex2jax: { inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\\\(','\\\\)']] }\n" +
"});"
head.appendChild(script);
script = document.createElement("script");
script.type = "text/javascript";
script.src = "https://example.com/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML";
head.appendChild(script);
})();
You can adjust the configuration to your needs, but be careful to get
the commas right, as Internet Explorer 6 and 7 will not tolerate an
extra comma before a closing brace. The window.opera
test is
because some versions of Opera don’t handle setting script.text
properly, while some versions of Internet Explorer don’t handle
setting script.innerHTML
.
Note that the only reliable way to configure MathJax is to use an
in-line configuration block of the type discussed above. You should
not call MathJax.Hub.Config()
directly in your code, as it will
not run at the correct time — it will either run too soon, in which case
MathJax
may not be defined and the function will throw an error, or it
will run too late, after MathJax has already finished its configuration
process, so your changes will not have the desired effect.
MathJax and GreaseMonkey¶
You can use techniques like the ones discussed above to good effect in GreaseMonkey scripts. There are GreaseMonkey work-alikes for all the major browsers:
- Firefox: GreaseMonkey
- Safari: GreaseKit (also requires SIMBL)
- Opera: Built-in (instructions)
- Internet Explorer: IEPro7
- Chrome: Built-in for recent releases
Note, however, that most browsers don’t allow you to insert a script
that loads a file://
URL into a page that comes from the web (for
security reasons). That means that you can’t have your GreaseMonkey
script load a local copy of MathJax, so you have to refer to a
server-based copy. The MathJax CDN works nicely for this.
Here is a script that runs MathJax in any document that contains MathML (whether it includes MathJax or not). That allows browsers that don’t have native MathML support to view any web pages with MathML, even if they say it only works in Firefox and IE+MathPlayer.
// ==UserScript==
// @name MathJax MathML
// @namespace http://www.mathjax.org/
// @description Insert MathJax into pages containing MathML
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==
if ((window.unsafeWindow == null ? window : unsafeWindow).MathJax == null) {
if ((document.getElementsByTagName("math").length > 0) ||
(document.getElementsByTagNameNS == null ? false :
(document.getElementsByTagNameNS("http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML","math").length > 0))) {
var script = document.createElement("script");
script.type = "text/javascript";
script.src = "https://example.com/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML-full";
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
}
}
Source: mathjax_mathml.user.js
Here is a script that runs MathJax in Wikipedia pages after first converting the math images to their original TeX code.
// ==UserScript==
// @name MathJax in Wikipedia
// @namespace http://www.mathjax.org/
// @description Insert MathJax into Wikipedia pages
// @include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
// ==/UserScript==
if ((window.unsafeWindow == null ? window : unsafeWindow).MathJax == null) {
//
// Replace the images with MathJax scripts of type math/tex
//
var images = document.getElementsByTagName('img'), count = 0;
for (var i = images.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
var img = images[i];
if (img.className === "tex") {
var script = document.createElement("script"); script.type = "math/tex";
if (window.opera) {script.innerHTML = img.alt} else {script.text = img.alt}
img.parentNode.replaceChild(script,img); count++;
}
}
if (count) {
//
// Load MathJax and have it process the page
//
var script = document.createElement("script");
script.type = "text/javascript";
script.src = "https://example.com/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML-full";
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
}
}
Source: mathjax_wikipedia.user.js