I should follow up with Joseph. My problem is that while we've optimised everything we can within our LaTeX rendering system, including catch all known bugs (except the current one!), to coding into one module many of the translators from DVI to gif, svg etc, we are ultimately reliant on the underlying LaTeX distribution. However we actually only what a small subset of everything LaTeX can do, so its now our only bottleneck.

If you follow the work of Mathjax which evolved from jsmath , then you rapidly come to the appreciation that we should be able to write our own maths rendering engine and bypass the entire LaTeX2 suite. The trouble with this is this is just something else to do, and I'm certainly busy enough, and we'll potentially struggle to remain fully compliant. Hence my interest in LaTeX3, and the hope this is more modular and we can link into our code the bits we need.

In case you're wondering, mathjax though beautifully done has a slightly different market. We can put equations anywhere, on other peoples blogs, in excel, word, etc. Mathjax can only really be installed by site admin and has a fairly hefty footprint when you only want 1 or 2 equations on your page.