Rendering Chemical Reactions

When I was a chemistry teacher at the local college, I wanted my students to submit lab reports electronically, but I had a fair amount of trouble figuring out how to include the chemical reactions they were doing. There were (and are) lots of chemical reaction drawing apps, but they were and are clunky and are really set up for printing. I've always wanted something that works in a browser. Well, I've played around a little, and at least got a particular reaction to render to the screen using .svg files and regular text. Very small and scalable, like the LaTex and MathJax examples in previous posts.

I'm putting here my first attempt, the reaction of benzoic acid with ethanol to yield ethyl benzoate. I'll follow this up with other examples and then try to put together an app to write a whole lab report, including the chemical reaction, in a browser.

Here's the reaction:

+       C₂H₅OH       →