The LaTeXML Daemon: Editable Math on the Collaborative Web

Introduction. The language of the TEX/LATEX typesetting system has become all-pervasive in scientific publications and has proven its stability, convenience and expressivity in its three-decade history. With the advent of the Web 2.0 paradigm, it has also become the primary choice of various technical and scientific social platforms, most prominently online encyclopedias (e.g. PlanetMath [Pla]) and question-answer forums (e.g. MathOverflow [Mat]). On the other hand, the standardization of MathML and OpenMath and the adoption of the former in HTML5, have opened the floodgates for scientific content native to the browser. LATEX on the Web. The efforts of bringing LATEX to the web are numerous and have varied in number and approach. Classical scenarios provide hooks to either LATEX itself or a LATEX daemon(e.g. [Uni]), incorporating formulas as PDF or PNG, while newer applications pursue a fully native output of XHTML+ MathML (see [Sta+09] for an overview). The LaTeXML [Mil] system, and particularly its enhanced branch maintained for the arXMLiv [Sta+10] project, belongs to the second category. It is currently the only system with experimental Content MathML support and is also prepared for further linguistic and semantic analysis of the document contents, as it not only expands TEX macros, but also allows for the definition of custom bindings that preserve and enhance the semantic information encoded by the authors. Moreover, it takes the effort one step further, being able to already create XHTML+MathML+RDFa and remains easily extensible to other output formats, such as HTML5+RDFa. A Daemon. In this abstract we present an extension, the LaTeXML daemon, which drastically widens the applications of the LaTeXML system, addressing the problems of efficient, scalable and on-the-fly processing. The daemon enhancements avoid the overhead of startup time and LATEXpackage initialization, achieving close to instant conversion times, and easily scale tomulti-threaded setups.This provides a great boost to conversion times not only in the processing of large-scale corpora, but also when employed as a backend for web services using LATEX as a frontend language. Maturity has been exhibited by converting one and a half million abstracts from the ZentralblattMATH [Zbl] database, coupled with a stable performance in various installations of the Planetary [Koh+11] system.