LaTeX equivalent to Google Chart API

Question

I'm currently looking at different solutions getting 2 dimensional mathematical formulas into webpages. I think that the wikipedia solution (generating png images from LaTeX sourcecode) is good enough until we get support for MathML in webbrowsers.

I suddenly realized that it might be possible to create a Google Charts API equivalent for mathformulas. Has this already been done? Is it even possible due to the strange characters involved in LaTeX-code?

I would like to hit an url like latex2png.org/api/?eq="E = mc^2" and get the following response:

edit: Thanks for the answers sofar. However, I am already aware of several tools to generate png images from latex source code (both online and from my commandline), but what I was looking for was a simple way to get the image via an Http GET request. Perhaps such a service does not exist.

Answer 1

Update

As @hughes (and others) pointed out, the previous Google Chart API has been deprecated.

The example I wrote still works as of Sept 2015, but a new one shall be used now (documentation):

Old answer

Google Chart can do it (Documentation):

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chl=%5CLaTeX

I'm using this with Google Docs, because it doesn't support math yet.

Answer 2

72pines.com More readable then chart.apis.google:

alt text http://tex.72pines.com/latex.php?latex=%0D%0A4x_0%5CDelta%28x%29%2B3%5CDelta%28x%29%2B2%5CDelta%28x%5E2%29%3E0%0D%0A

http://tex.72pines.com/latex.php?latex=%0D%0A4x_0%5CDelta%28x%29%2B3%5CDelta%28x%29%2B2%5CDelta%28x%5E2%29%3E0%0D%0A

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or chart.apis.google with background color changed

https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chf=bg,s,FFFF00&chl=%0D%0A4x_0%5CDelta%28x%29%2B3%5CDelta%28x%29%2B2%5CDelta%28x%5E2%29%3E0%0D%0A

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or chart.apis.google with background color transparent and resized

https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chs=428x35&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00&chl=%0D%0A4x_0%5CDelta%28x%29%2B3%5CDelta%28x%29%2B2%5CDelta%28x%5E2%29%3E0%0D%0A