the story so far (part one: into the world of beautiful math typesetting)

As the first post I just want to talk about my own journey here and what led to starting this project. In part one here, I will ramble about my introduction to the world of math typesetting.

Through school up until high school (junior college here in Singapore) math have been generally been a pen and paper endeavor. I started tutoring while in the army pre-university and that's when I started preparing worksheets/notes digitally with Microsoft Word.

I remember just starting off keying equations normally. $2x+3y=5$ came out as 2x+3y=5 and never looked right regardless of what font I chose. Symbols like $\lambda, \mu$ and $\pi$ had to be hunted down in the Greek symbols section, and superscripts and subscripts $x^2$ and $x_1$ had to rely on Word's implementation of it. And not to mention having to type fractions like $\frac{3}{4}$ as 3/4. My gosh, the typesetting travesty I unleashed on my students.

I only remember finding the Equation Editor only much later after getting a newer version of Word (Office 2007?). Now finally my worksheets and notes are looking correct. And it even comes with an align mode to align equations! Using it still took forever and creating documents was a chore.

Finally I entered university and heard about $\LaTeX$. It was really weird as first, going from a WYSIWYG editor having to compile documents. There was quite a bit of a learning curve, but I slowly managed to transition away from Word fully.

The PDF format was great for worksheets and handouts, but things were moving digital and getting math typeset correctly on the web is a new challenge. Prof Chan introduced me to MathJax, and after getting it working on my WordPress blog I paid for web hosting for the first time in my life in 2013 and hosted a math blog/resource site for students. I unfortunately let the domain name lapse for my first blog at mathelement.com and have since migrated to adotb.xyz. I just paid for a 5 year hosting renewal but will probably let that lapse once that's up.

I have since moved from MathJax to KaTeX as my go-to choice for typesetting math on the web.

So that's a brief history of one of my motivations for this project: moving beautifully typeset mathematics to the digital age.

In part two I would talk about my programming/coding history that also contributed to my motivations.