Displaying LaTeX formulae on web pages

For a while now, I have been pondering about the best way to display to LaTeX formulae in web pages.

There are many web sites which will take your LaTeX equation and turn it into a PNG image. There are also a bunch of programs that will allow you to create those equation images offline.

However, I did not find those solutions to be satisfactory (based on purely subjective taste criteria which I am not willing to try to enumerate ;-)

Today, I found out that Google’s chart API also allows you to render LaTeX equations.

The logo I used on this page was generated using the URL http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chl=%5cLaTeX&chs=18&chf=bg,s,dadada. The style on the IMG element is simply:

.post img.inline {
  border:0;
  padding:0;
  margin:0;
  vertical-align:text-bottom;
}

And, here is a utility maximization problem:

[ Maximize utility subject to the budget and nonnegativity constraints ]

i like it.

Update my module template::plugin::googlelatex enables you to type equations in template toolkit documents and converts them to appropriate url’s for Google’s service. See it used on Why are macro guys so grumpy?.