Hi,

   Not all browsers support MathML in a nice way. Another approach to embed
mathematics in Html is to use the MathJax javascript library
(http://www.mathjax.org/) that makes clever use of CSS for displaying Math.
I've created a patch for including this functionality when exporting to
html so the same code can be used for Html and latex backends.

Here it is the diff against asciidoc-8.6.8:

diff -r 07b55a89f0c6 xhtml11.conf
--- a/xhtml11.conf    Wed Oct 24 21:29:16 2012 +0200
+++ b/xhtml11.conf    Wed Oct 24 21:41:15 2012 +0200
@@ -616,6 +616,21 @@
 /*]]>*/
 </script>
 endif::linkcss[]
+ifdef::mathjax[]
+<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">
+    MathJax.Hub.Config({
+      extensions: ["tex2jax.js"],
+      jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
+      tex2jax: {
+        inlineMath: [ ['$','$'], ["\\(","\\)"] ],
+        displayMath: [ ['$$','$$'], ["\\[","\\]"] ],
+        processEscapes: true
+      },
+      "HTML-CSS": { availableFonts: ["TeX"] }
+    });
+  </script>
+<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js"></script>
+endif::mathjax[]
 endif::latexmath[]
 {docinfo1,docinfo2#}{include:{docdir}/docinfo.html}
 {docinfo,docinfo2#}{include:{docdir}/{docname}-docinfo.html}

Here it is a minimal example using mathematical formulas

Minimal Example
===============

Display beautiful formulas with MathJax like famous latexmath:[$E=mc^2$] or
the
cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution

[latexmath]
++++
\[
F(x;\mu,\sigma)=\int_{-\infty}^x \frac{1}{\sigma\sqrt{2\pi}}
e^{-\frac{(x-\mu)^2}{2\sigma^2}}
\]
++++

In order to obtain the MathJax version of the HTML run "asciidoc -a mathjax
minimal.asciidoc" and you'll get the beautiful math in any modern browser.

I'd like to have this functionality as default for the xhtml11 backend but
I don't know how to do this without the -a option.

Hope it is useful to you.

Regards
Toni

Lex and Toni:

The "someone else" is me. The documentation I did on this topic can be
found here:

http://quaoar.us:8080/mathjax.html

I have not had any time to do more with this. Also, I am not confident in
my ability to
create a plug-in for this capability. This is the main reason that I did
not follow up
in order to provide a plug-in. In my opinion the ability to use this
MathJax option
for rendering mathematics notation using LaTeX formulas would be useful and
further extend the capabilities of Asciidoc. However, I lack the know-how
and the
time to acquire it to  make this an easy to use option in the form of a
plug-in, etc.
in way that would allow Asciidoc users to use this feature easily. I hope
that someone
who has the time and interest in helping me with this will reply so that
MathJax
is an option  available for Asciidoc users that does not require manually
editing
config files as I did in the documentation of the link above. By the way,
my
recollection is that I was able to get this to work as well with the slidy
option.

Best wishes.

David Miller