Latex rendering issues in the book

[michaelpj]

At the moment the Plutus Book contains some Latex copied from (I think) the EUTXO with scripts paper or maybe the ledger spec.

This has some rendering issues:

• In the HTML output, it uses MathJax, which works really very well.
• In the PDF and EPUB outputs, it tries to use asciidoctor-mathematical, which prerenders images of the latex and includes them. However, this seems to be pretty bad, and mis-renders a lot of symbols. Plus, the upstream seems to be dead.

Given that we want good EPUB output, I can see a couple of ways forward:

• Investigate dblatex. No guarantee that it will work, and I think it might only do PDF and not EPUB.
• Give up on actual Latex and just use images taken from the rendered versions of the thing we're taking them from. This will definitely work, but will look less nice in the HTML version.

Given that we don't actually have that much Latex, I'm inclined to go with the latter one.

Thoughts @polinavino @brunjlar ?

[michaelpj]

Hm, there might be a plugin for https://github.com/wikimedia/mathoid. That could be promising.

[michaelpj]

Although I'm going to have to package this awful node thing to even try it out, sigh.

[michaelpj]

I packaged the awful node thing. Now the problem is that the asciidoctor extension is bad. Arrrrgh.

[michaelpj]

I might be able to make the mathoid thing work, and I think it would be good if I got it working, but I think it's at least another day or two's work.