Configuring Thebe to use MathJax version 3

[jorgengaldal]

Hi!

We are having problems when displaying math in ipywidgets because Thebe is configured to use MathJax version 2.7.5, while the rest of the book is using version 3.2.2.

This seems to override the global MathJax object when Thebe is trying to typeset (through ipython.display(ipython.display.HTML()).

How can we configure the book to tell Thebe to use MathJax version 3 instead of version 2. We've tried adding mathjaxUrl: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js" in _config.yml under thebe_config, but it does not seem like the config is passed through to Thebe.

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

@DianaBanta , would you know how to do this?

[rlanzafame]

out of curiosity, is it the same issue that is happening on this page?
https://rlanzafame.github.io/Finite-Elements-in-CEG/main/introduction/discrete.html
It was caused by book pages that are executed during build, as described here:
https://github.com/orgs/TeachBooks/discussions/38

[jorgengaldal]

No, it does not seem to be the same issue. In our book, the math on the page itself renders correctly with MathJax version 3 (we also have execute_notebooks: "off" in the config). However we have some math that is generated dynamically (through ipywidgets and run with Thebe), and when we load ipywidgets.HTMLMath (which uses MathJax), the version is changed to MathJax version 2, which causes some problems for us.

[rlanzafame]

OK, thanks for confirming. It's definitely not something I am confident with, but @DianaBanta is the best person to see if there is an easy solution via Thebe as you asked. Actually I see one possibility, I will post shortly below as a new comment.

[rlanzafame]

I see that you are using our Sphinx-Thebe package that is stored on GitLab: https://github.com/jorgengaldal/teachbooks-test/blob/main/requirements.txt#L10

We have since moved it over to GitHub (we should be able to notify users about this soon via our mailing list, consider signing up if you have not already).

The package will be shared as a sphinx extension and for now the repo is here: https://github.com/TeachBooks/Sphinx-Thebe
The Template book shows how we include it in our books now: https://github.com/TeachBooks/template/blob/main/requirements.txt#L12

git+https://github.com/TeachBooks/Sphinx-Thebe

So the solution I am wondering about is if you create a fork of https://github.com/TeachBooks/Sphinx-Thebe and are able to change the MathJax stuff there, then adapt your requirements.txt?

[jorgengaldal]

The actual repo for our book is https://github.com/ForceoftheCyber/CyberBook (the one you linked to was just a test repo), but we have already updated the requirements here to use the correct version of Sphinx-Thebe.
I will try forking the repo. Thank you!

[rlanzafame]

great, let us know how it works out!

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

• this one is what we currently use but requires specifying git+... in the requirements.txt: https://github.com/TeachBooks/teachbooks-Sphinx-Thebe
• this one is needs some adjustments before being released on PyPI: https://github.com/TeachBooks/teachbooks-Sphinx-Thebe

Main one is: https://github.com/TeachBooks/teachbooks-Sphinx-Thebe
https://github.com/TeachBooks/Sphinx-Thebe is the one we just have to overwrite the default sphinx-thebe functionality which links to docker.

[jorgengaldal]

Changing the config in the forked version of Sphinx-Thebe worked. Thank you!

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

Opened a pull request: TeachBooks/TeachBooks-Sphinx-Thebe#5 to merge this into our version