Benjamin Hackl

New talk at AofA22, and a note on typesetting math with reveal.js

Date: June 20, 2022
Tags: math, conference, AofA, revealjs

I had the pleasure of presenting recent joint work with Alois Panholzer and Stephan Wagner on the analysis of a stochastic process involving iteratively uncovering the vertices and edges of labeled trees at AofA22.

While preparing the slides for my talk (see embed below), I stumbled over an interesting solution for a problem that has somewhat haunted me while using reveal.js, namely the missing ability to make parts of typeset math into fragments (which means that these parts can be faded in separately, think \pause in LaTeX-beamer).

The solution I applied has been provided in this GitHub issue, with a working (recent) version of the proposal in the files provided in this comment by @manuelbb-upb. With the updated math.js provided there, reveal.js’ MathJaX plugin is extended (among other things) with a \fragment{<fragment-index>}{<fragment-content>} command that can be used like

\[ x^2 \fragment{1}{ + y^2} \fragment{2}{= z^2} \]

to produce a typeset equation that will be gradually uncovered to first show $x^2$, then $x^2 + y^2$, and then the full $x^2 + y^2 = z^2$.

Unfortunately the order does not seem to combine well with nodes with set data-fragment-index outside of the math environment, but it is still nice to be able to use at least some fragment-magic in typeset math.