Link to LaTeX to HTML

One of the projects I recently undertook was a chrome extension that would accept LaTeX as input and output HTML code that would render the LaTeX in a nice format.

At my job at the Space Dynamics Lab, I was able to do something similar. We had some units that we wanted to render in a pretty format, for example, if we had ‘sec/m^2’ we could render it as:

$\frac{\text{sec}}{\text{m}^2}$

The LaTeX code I used was \frac{\text{sec}}{\text{m}^2}.

This made reading these units much easier. We used KaTeX to take the LaTeX and turn it into HTML. We did have an in-between step because people we not putting in LaTeX code, so we had to find a way to turn ascii math into LaTeX. After that issue was solved our web application is able to take in ascii math and output HTML.

I learned quite a bit about the chrome API while creating this extension. I had to learn about storing data locally and extension specific events. While I already knew JavaScript, which is the language that chrome extensions are written in, it still had a slight learning curve. This being said the documentation is pretty helpful and going through the tutorial was the most helpful part.