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Anything to keep in mind for non Western (i.e. Asian) characters

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Davide P. Cervone edited this page May 26, 2013 · 1 revision

From https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mathjax-users/qsF0sppcjrc/pKlVcGxvOEAJ

Is there anything I need to keep in mind if I'm using MathJax to display math that includes Japanese/Chinese/Korean characters (such as some textual label in an <mtext> element)? Which font(s) does MathJax use for such characters? Is that configurable?

The MathJax web fonts do not include CJK characters, so if they are used within your math (like in an <mtext> element or \text{} command), MathJax will see them as unknown characters, and so will use a list of fonts in hopes that one of them will contain the desired characters. This list is stored in the undefinedFamily parameter of the HTML-CSS and SVG sections of your MathJax configuration, so you can specify the fonts you want to try. There is no guarantee that the viewer has these fonts installed, however.

It is also possible to tell MathJax to render <mtext> and \text{} content in the font currently in use on the page at the location where the math is found rather than to try to use its own fonts. That is controlled by the mtextFontInherit parameter in the HTML-CSS and SVG sections of your configuration. If you set that to true then the <mtext> and \text{} content should be visible in the same way as the text in the rest of the page.

See the MathJax HTML-CSS documentation for more details on these parameters.

I don't know if there are any encoding issues to be worried about. If you can use UTF-8 or UTF-16 encodings for the CJK characters on your pages, then I think you should not have any trouble.

Davide

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