SEEKING ADVICE: Converting Equations to MathJax in Pressbooks

[Monique Belair]

Hello,

I'm managing an Open Textbook Pilot grant to create seven openly licensed textbooks in the proftech/career technical field. We're about to start migrating the first of seven of our textbooks from Google docs to Pressbooks and I need some advice. The textbook is Math for Bakery and Business and will require MathJax to present math equations in Pressbooks. We've played around some with using AI to help convert equations to MathJax but wonder if it would be more reliable and effective to contract someone to do the work instead. The equations are fairly straightforward, if that helps. 

With that, my questions to you all are:

1. Has anyone had success using AI to convert MathJax into Pressbooks? If so, what are your prompts and processes? Ideally, we'd love the entire chapter delivered as html code with the equations converted. 
2. What successful approaches are you aware of for converting equations to MathJax in Pressbooks?
3. What kinds of questions should I be asking to locate someone to contract with who is familiar with MathJax (bonus - Pressbooks) and may want to assist?

Grateful for any and all input!

Monique

Monique Belair (hear my name)

she/her/hers why add pronouns?

Project Manager - WA Open ProfTech

Educational Resources & Innovation Team

Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges

SBCTC Vision

“Leading with racial equity, our colleges maximize student potential and transform lives within a culture of belonging that advances racial, social, and economic justice in service to our diverse communities”

Book time to meet with me

[Steel Wagstaff]

Hi Monique,

A couple of clarifying details that might help you and colleagues:

1. MathJax is an open source javascript library that renders mathematical expressions in the user's browser. It is capable of handling several types of input.

2. Pressbooks has a native integration with MathJax that allows users to input math expressions using MathML, LaTeX, or AsciiMath. As long as you have valid expressions in one of these three forms (using the delimiters described here: https://guide.pressbooks.com/chapter/add-mathematical-notation/#mathjax or on our MathJax settings page within your book), the math should render beautifully and accessibility in the webbook via the built-in MathJax integration.Pressbooks will also produce accessible images for these expressions when generating export files, since it's harder to reliable use MathJax in EPUB and PDF formats.

 No further action should be needed for authors.

3. The key goal for your team will be to make sure that whatever source document you're importing from has math equations wrapped in your choice of delimiters/input notation.

Happy to discuss in further detail with you or your colleagues at your convenience.

All best,

Steel Wagstaff

Customer Experience Lead

st...@pressbooks.com

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[Brenda Gardner]

Hi Monique,

I'm doing something very similar with one of our textbooks (with 2 more in the pipeline) - however I'm converting from Word (.docx) to Pressbooks.  I have tried quite a few A.I. platforms to help in the conversion, but also use Pandoc, which is open source and can help with full document conversion.

To build on Steel's reply, here are a couple options that have worked for me:

• Pandoc - this is open source and converts between many different document types.  We convert all our Word files to HTML using this.
  • If you have anyone on your team tech savy, they can download this and run it in a terminal to very quickly do conversions.  
  • For a bit less savy option, you can try the web version converter on a single document at a time at https://pandoc.org/app/.  You can select the math rendering as MathJax option.  
  • It should also easily convert your equations to LaTeX, which you can then add the appropriate Pressbooks syntax around.  
• Claude CoWork has actually done a very nice job fully converting a given document to the required Pressbook HTML required.  
  • I used a lot of A.I. platforms before this and this was easily the cleanest/most accurate for the conversion I wanted.  
  • Note: Claude CoWork is $20/month for a pretty limited Pro version.  I can only do a few documents per day given the credit restrictions.  You can increase to higher cost subscription model if you find it works for you and you want to process more and have funding.  
  • Here's a snippet of what I included in my last prompt "Convert the following .docx file to HTML and be sure to include converting the equations to the Pressbooks form - using the cleaner syntax using brackets for centered equations and parentheses for inline. Examples: \( e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0 \) for inline and \[ e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0 \] for centered on it's own line."  
  • Beyond that I add additional prompting that is specific to how we layout our current Word file so that HTML textboxes are added around our examples, etc.  
• Manually:  A more tedious but low tech workflow is:
  • Export your document to Word
  • Convert your equations to "linear form" or Latex in Word's Equation Editor.  
  • After converting the file to HTML, I've done a find/replace adding [latex] to the front of the equation and [/latex] or the other syntax that Steel linked to.  

I am still working on nailing down the best process without overusing A.I., but feel free to contact me if you want additional assistance or input.  

Click for an example page of the math I've rendered onto Pressbooks.   

Brenda Gardner

Professor, Math

Salt Lake Community College

brenda....@slcc.edu