Display Good-looking Math Formula in Android

Question

It is sad to see that science and math is never given enough attention in Android platform. Maybe this is an easy problem, but I\'m a total dude in javascript so I\

Answer 1

Late to the party but I think I have a better solution than Joe's. The original question asked:

how can I show plain text in paragraph and a formatted equation within the same webview?

In the original example we had:

w.loadUrl("javascript:document.getElementById('math').innerHTML='\\\\["
                  +doubleEscapeTeX("sample string")
                  +"\\\\]';");

Do you notice the \\\\[ and \\\\]? Those four backslashes are interpreted by LaTeX as only one, and \[ and \] in LaTeX is a shorthand for \begin{equation}... \end{equation} which produces a block of displayed mathematics. If we want a paragraph of text with some equations within the paragraph we need to get rid of the \\\\[ and use the LaTeX command \( and \). The code for an example with paragraph mathematics and displayed mathematics would be:

w.loadUrl("javascript:document.getElementById('math').innerHTML='"
   +doubleEscapeTeX(
           "This is a second degree equation \\( \\small ax^2+bx+c=0\\) and its "
          +"roots are \\[x=\\frac{-b\\pm \\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}. \\]"
    )+"';");

The WebView becomes: Notes:

• We only need two backslashes instead of four, this is because we are inside doubleEscapeTeX() and this function duplicates the backslashes.

• Also the text outside the math environments is rendered with HTML (inside the tag).

• The LaTeX font is bigger that the html font, so adding a \\small in each math environment will make them roughly the same size. Here I added the \\small command only to the first equation to show the difference.