Is a stand-alone installation possible?

[justinacolmena]

Does this work say for instance offline for private use as well as on the web without contacting third-party services?

Is it free and open source or are there specific service-provider domain names hard-coded in the software?

[dpvc]

Does this work say for instance offline for private use as well as on the web without contacting third-party services?

Yes. See the documentation on hosting your own copy of MathJax. Note, however, that using file:// URLs can be problematic in some cases, as most browsers' security policies have a pretty restrictive idea of what the "same origin" means for file:// urls, which can make access to MathJax's fonts more difficult. You might need to use SVG output to avoid that, or use a local web server, like

python -m http.server 8000

in the directory with your HTML files and load your pages via http://localhost:8000/index.html.

Is it free and open source or are there specific service-provider domain names hard-coded in the software?

It is free and open source (the source code for v3 and above can be found here). MathJax is licensed under the Apache2 open-soutce license, which is pretty lenient.

Version 3 has no external references. Version 4 (currently in beta) references cdn.jsdelivr.net for the font packages, but there is a configuration option that lets you change that.

[justinacolmena]

You might need to use SVG output to avoid that, or use a local web server,

My goal is to put it on the web and make it publicly accessible. Otherwise I have pencil and paper for equations for my private use, and I have no need of a computer for that.

Now for the svg, I make a very simple document and save it as eq1.tex. Latex offers a lot of font choices, but the defaults are very nice and suitable for educational and professional purposes.

\documentclass[]{article}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
        $$E=mc^2$$
\end{document}

And then the following

user1@fedora0:~/Documents$ lualatex eq1.tex 
This is LuaHBTeX, Version 1.17.0 (TeX Live 2023) 
 restricted system commands enabled.
(./eq1.tex
LaTeX2e <2022-11-01> patch level 1
 L3 programming layer <2023-02-22>
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2022/07/02 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-luatex.def)
(./eq1.aux) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/ts1cmr.fd) [1{/var/li
b/texmf/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}] (./eq1.aux))
 410 words of node memory still in use:
   3 hlist, 1 vlist, 1 rule, 2 glue, 3 kern, 1 glyph, 5 attribute, 48 glue_spec
, 5 attribute_list, 1 write nodes
   avail lists: 1:1,2:23,3:8,4:1,5:23,6:2,7:40,8:5,9:22
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmmi10.pfb></usr/
share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr10.pfb></usr/share/t
exlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr7.pfb>
Output written on eq1.pdf (1 page, 23026 bytes).
Transcript written on eq1.log.
user1@fedora0:~/Documents$ pdfcrop eq1.pdf 
PDFCROP 1.40, 2020/06/06 - Copyright (c) 2002-2020 by Heiko Oberdiek, Oberdiek Package Support Group.
==> 1 page written on `eq1-crop.pdf'.
user1@fedora0:~/Documents$ magick -density 600 eq1-crop.pdf eq1.svg
user1@fedora0:~/Documents$

The resulting file eq1.svg may then be uploaded and pasted in a web document anywhere, perfectly scalable. Or, I can construct equations from scratch in plain old HTML with <div> and <hr> and <i> and <font> and <table> elements using UTF-8 math characters and allowing any font whatsoever which would be suitable to display them. What the browsers themselves should do if they were capable of MathML.

At some point, I am considering the convenience of coding math equations in straight HTML in comparison to debugging obscure \LaTeX{} issues.

What I do not want to do is create a website with a lot of cross site scripting vulnerabilities and dependencies on third party APIs to display basic content.

• https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/secure-design-alert-eliminating-cross-site-scripting-vulnerabilities

Mathjax fonts might not be the fonts that I want to use for my math equations, but if the fonts are available, then I might want to install them locally on my web server and include them in the <head> section of the web page directly to be served without the javascript on the same domain.

[justinacolmena]

[dpvc]

Well, it looks like you have everything you want, without the need for MathJax. Carry on, then!