Writing mathematical presentations using mathjax

Question

I would like to make (simple) mathematical presentations using mathjax. Most importantly I want to be able to let text show up step by step. Does anybody here know a program that would allow me to do this without too much hazzle ?

I'm afraid that this is not the right place to ask this, but as I think other mathematicians may find this question also interesting, I hope it is ok to ask it here.

Answer 1

It sounds to me that you want one of the ways of integrating latex into powerpoint. I've heard good things about iguanatex, which is free and would do the job. I should note that $\LaTeX$ actually has a presentation-type documentclass, called 'beamer.' You can read more about that here.

Answer 2

If you really want to make presentations using Mathjax, and assuming you have basic knowledge of HTML/JS, I propose:

• Have each slide you want to present a different <div> element, and after building all of them set them to style="display:none" so they are all hidden when a user browses your site;
• Code some sort of navigation in your page, for example buttons "Next" and "Previous".

With this, you are able to use Mathjax inside each <div>, hidding all the other slides but the one you're showing, and then you can swift through different <div> elements with the navigation buttons (which through Javascript will hide and show the relevant <div> you want to present at the time).

Something like this example, notice the upper banners (they can be considered as pure image slides, yours would be text+images+latex).

Answer 3

I guess you just want the formulas, written in the mathjax syntax. The Mathjax syntax is based on the $\LaTeX$ syntax and $\LaTeX$ itself has a documentclass (not only one) for presentations with beamers (the so called beamer class).
I think it would be strange if you swap to a new slide and mathjax isn't rendered.

Even though the syntax is similar $\LaTeX$ is totally different to Mathjax and it really needs some time till you produce something. If you want to go on with mathematics you should invest the time to learn $\LaTeX$.

When you only have simple formulas and the presentation is in some days, I think you should not try setting it in $\LaTeX$, better use something were you actually see what you are doing.

I just want to add that I think a powerpoint presentation (on this principle based) is in my opinion not really good in math. One usually clicks to fast and so the audience has not enough time to unterstand what is going on.

If you say for what the presentation is intended we could help more specifically.

Answer 4

Pandoc provides a very nice way to create slides with various formats from a basic Markdown source file. It is possible to have html slides and beamer slides (pdf output and/or LaTeX source code) from the same source code.

The freely available tool required: Pandoc

Here is the Markdown source file of the example I have just typed.

input.md file:

Slides with Markdown
========================================================

# Contents

- Typing mathematics 

- Including a web application

# Typing mathematics 

Type mathematics as in `math.stackexchange.com` : $\int_0^1 f(x) \mathrm{d}x$

# Including a web application

Type the `html` source code you want:

<iframe src="http://glimmer.rstudio.com/stla/3Dsliced/" style="border: none; width: 500px; height: 700px"></iframe>

And here is a link to the html output file: output.html.

The html output file is obtained with Pandoc by typing the command line

pandoc -s -S -i -t slidy --mathjax input.md -o output.html

where ìnput.md is the name of the Markdown source file.

To get a beamer output type:

pandoc -s -S -i -t beamer input.md -o output.pdf

And here is the link to the pdf output file: output.pdf

To get the source LaTeX file producing the beamer pdf :

pandoc -s -S -i -t beamer input.md -o output.tex

More details about this procedure are availbale in the Pandoc documentation and from here.

Answer 5

I would strongly recommend using the $\LaTeX$ beamer class, which allows you to create presentations that can be uncovered in steps (among others), while retaining the power of $\LaTeX$ for typesetting Maths.

Answer 6

Let me show you how the pros (admittedly, in other fields) do it:

Use any HTML/CSS/JS presentation library. For example, a nice one is reveal.js. Usually, they have a sample presentation to get you started.

Add a script pointing to MathJax's CDN or to a local directory (assuming that you might not have a decent Internet connection). For example, I added this at the bottom of the sample presentation of reveal.js:

<script type="text/javascript"
    src="https://c328740.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML">
</script>

Then you're good to go. Write whatever you want to appear in LaTex-like format:

<div class="reveal">

    <!-- Any section element inside of this container is displayed as a slide -->
    <div class="slides">

        <section>
             <h1>Reveal.js</h1>
             <h3>Latex Presentations Made Easy</h3>
             <p>
                $$\frac{1}{n}\sqrt{e^\frac{1}{n} - e^\frac{1}{n+1}}\sim\frac{1}{n^2}$$
             </p>
             <p>
            <small>Created by <a href="http://hakim.se">Hakim El Hattab</a> / <a href="http://twitter.com/hakimel">@hakimel</a></small>
             </p>
         </section>
        ... 
    </div>
</div>

The result should be something like this:

In addition of this, reveal.js (and a bunch of other libraries) allow you to write your presentation in Markdown, quotes, snippets of code, link to other slides in your presentation, export your presentation to PDF, among other features.