math equations?

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What's the better way to enter math equations into a post here? Is there a tried and true method?

For example, I wrote this: http://www.infinitefactors.org/docs/d_ln_x.pdf

How might I write something like that, but instead where we took it a step at a time and I didn't want to publish 50 PDF files in the process and I wanted others to contribute their own thoughts?

Jon

If you have a scanner, you could write it, scan it, and post it as an image.

You could use a drawing program like paint and post it as an image.

Those, I know about. I was hoping someone might tell me that mathml or mathtype or something like that was already modded into phpBB on this site. If I must, I'll use other methods and post up PDF files, instead.

Jon

I'll ask Alex and Lau.

The unfortunate side to pdf is that it's not going to be editable.

The board is NOT going to accept mathml, as the whole point behind BBCODE is that only a tiny amount of functionality is supported, on purpose. All HTML is blocked. This avoids all the simple security loopholes.

In order to be fully accessible to everyone, have you considered using OpenOffice? By publishing Open Document Format files, they will be editable by anyone.

If your current source is in MS Word format, you should find you can just open it with OpenOffice, then save it as ODF. (The file size will be about the same, as OO tries to be slavishly faithful to the Word files. If you start in OO, the file size would be much smaller.)

If you really want to go the XHTML route, you probably need to find some webspace elsewhere, to publish your files.

Am I being silly here? www.infinitefactors.org is your webspace?

Yes, unless someone has acrobat and not just the reader. But then, seems like there are no slick solutions. My preference would be to just type in "{w+1} over 6" and see the fraction nicely formatted on the preview. But... oh, well.


I would have thought that, instead, the software would simply produce on-the-fly gif/jpg/png files from each expression and save it in an auto-generated, named file as an 'img' thing -- which is just BBCODE. The only cost is the CPU time and the tracking for all the tiny files. But I can do that myself and upload them and then link them it. It's just a lot better, when a computer is doing all the busywork instead of me. And no security holes beyond what is already there with BBCODE.


I have it installed on this laptop, in fact, and I used it to generate the PDF I posted a link towards. Also, if I were to have decided to generate PDF files, I would have used OpenOffice to make them in the first place. So I'd prefer posting up ODF files over PDF, if folks can use that. Anyway, it may be the better solution available at this time.

In any case, I've no business suggesting any changes here. I'm just trying to make sure that I don't miss some feature that exists. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Best of all for a math dialog, obviously, would be a text+math environment where I could simply type in latex or something else and have either the necessary fonts available for free or else the software on the server needed to produce the image files on the fly. Short of that, it's manual labor all the way for everyone. (Too bad that in the 21st century we can't write a simple fraction as part of our text and have it come out according to the usual rules found in textbooks.)


No... you already mentioned the better solution, OpenOffice. Better than that, anyway.


Well, I suppose so. I guess, if I set up the software and so on I could refer people to a different site. But then, that kind of defeats some of the purpose.


I have just turned off the main access, there, for now because Becky wanted to focus on some other things and get back to this at another time. Yes, that is it. It's the most expensive business account Dreamhost offers, which means it is vast overkill even in our wildest dreams, let alone reality. Considering suggesting something?

Jon

I don't know from math, but I know that you can generate the higher ascii characters by alt+the ascii number (this varies by font, unfortunately.. For example, alt+164 gives you ñ
Greek letters, etc., are used for some formulae...not sure if this is a help (and it'd be a @#$% to type them out... but some could be done. Depends on what sort of formula you want to express...

Well...

I get some webspace as part of the deal with my ISP. It's a bit of a pain, at times, because they are rather selective about what file types they permit. They allow .doc (riddled with viruses) and block .odf (erm... are there any viruses for OO yet?). Still, they also allow most compressed files, so I can put most things there.

Secondly, I happen to be running a webserver myself, 24/7, at the present time - for a limited duration project. I can put anything I like there, as it is this machine.

I did register with heartinternet some time back, when they were touting vast amounts of free webspace, but it transpired that you had to at least buy your domain through them.

==============

Sudden thought... Wikipedia seems to have mathml capability, but then I discovered that they use the technique you described - auto-generating fixed size PNG images from TEX source. The article there shows what I thought - that essentially those browsers using the Mozilla/Gecko engine are the only ones supporting mathml directly, so far.

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So, where does that leave things? I think the only way to go is as you are already at - use the ODF format as the basic source. At some point, exporting mathml from that (which apparently OO already does) will allow it to be web-visible, to Firefox/SeaMonkey/Camino/etc users. Exporting it as PDF as well means people could view but not edit it.

For equations, the gold standard is LaTeX - nothing else renders in quite the same way, and it's quite possible nothing else ever will.

Openoffice equation editor is nice, but I find it's much harder to get things to look "right". I don't know how good the newest microsoft equation editor is, but my guess is it's roughly the same.

There are extensions to lots of message board systems that allow inline latex, but that requires some investment in time on alex's part.

The next-to-best solution I can think of is using some kind of standalone latex equation editor like this, since you already have webspace: http://www.thrysoee.dk/laeqed/ (disclaimer: I haven't tried this particular one)

It might be a bit inconvenient to upload and link the images, but no more so than most other methods I can think of.

Thanks. I took a look at the laeqed web site and it looks both intriguing as well as easy enough to follow. I think I'll try putting some time into it. I could certainly create a folder to hold project folders and then use project folders for each paper or subject. Or something like that. Still, I wish it could be automated so that I could enter the text in this reply editor and have it automatically stripped out, prepared and sent to laeqed, for example, for the PNG file, and then automatically named and filed away in a "thread folder" and the name inserted between img and /img BBCODEs, without my having to worry. Then, if I edited the post, my text would still be there as originally inserted, for later editing (and the regeneration of the replacement PNG file, obviously.)

Clearly, that isn't likely to work unless the phpBB or SimpleMachines or whatever BB system I'm posting on happens to also be on my site, as well. In terms of that happening, I need to look at the installation requirements for laeqed and discuss them, perhaps, with Dreamhost. Although I have shell access, it's a shared server and I'm not sure just how much control they are likely to let me have. If I had a separate server of my own... different thing. But I don't. So... even that may be out of my control. And in any case, none of that would serve the purpose of posting here.

Which brings me back, if nothing else did, to a lot of manual mechanics. This is, roughly, the equivalent of wanting to write a story and having to use 7 switches and a pushbutton to enter each letter. It really gets in the way, you know?

Jon

If you're planning to run your own forum software on your server, you don't want a program like laeqed, I believe. Instead you would want to follow the directions for your particular forum software to enable latex equations - it seems commonplace enough that popular forums like phpbb or vbulletin should have something already in place, I would hope.

(i.e., I mean that someone should have already programmed exactly what you describe - parsing out the latex from the post, running latex to get the PNG out of it, stashing it in some kind of holding folder, and linking the result)

I don't know specifically how people do this kind of thing, though, so I can't promise that's correct, though

Okay. I've loaded up a bunch of software regarding laeqed and here is my first test:



See if this seems to work.

The process for this is: Run laeqed from a link on my desktop, wait for java to start up and see laeqed appear, enter the LaTeX stuff, hit ctrl-Enter, wait for it to generate the image, use File/Save-As, save image somewhere on my machine, rename it as appropriate, fire up "network places" and click on my ftp site, wait for that, click through some folders, create folders as needed, drag and drop png file, delete the desktop file as it's on the net now, work out the URL for it, run back to WP editing, insert it into the text and add img bookends to it, and go type a little more, then repeat as necessary.

7 switches and a pushbutton for entering ASCII, basically.

I'm going to see about setting up all this (forum software et al) on my shared server site. Even with the hassles at first, ultimately could save me oodles of time. But what would it cost WP to mod the board for this? I mean, how many people _actually_ would produce and/or read math threads anyway?? It's not like it would bring the server to its knees, for gosh sake.

Jon

OK. So that wasn't too painful, and it is editable, which is a plus.

The OpenOffice ODF form was ... different. No obvious way of publishing it conveniently.

I could do with a better WYSIWYG editor for the latex. Laeqed is pretty basic, though it certainly is a nice way of handling the game. A pity that the PNG file format doesn't scale. SVG would be nicer, I would think.

Am I not understanding laeqed? I can't seem to get %\DeclareMathOperator to function in it. Also, the same goes for \begin and \end sections. Doesn't seem to default to text mode, at all, and is stuck in math mode??

Jon

Yes. I suppose that would work. Knuth went nuts dealing with scaling down/up, intelligently, fancified fonts with filigrees, fiddlybits, and whatnot. I'm not all that familiar with SVG or DVI, but isn't DVI pretty general, already? In fact, perfect as an endpoint? Shouldn't web browsers simply support DVI, directly? I suppose SVG is a kind of subset, merely supporting scalable vectors, where as DVI I think supports a whole lot more.... but I will bow to your thoughts on this. Anyway, DVI has been around for a LOT longer than SVG, I suspect.

Jon

Okay. I think I answered something about this.

The laeqed program appears to wrap up any entered text with a \begin{equation*} and \end{equation*} pair. The solution, part of it anyway, is to quickly close things up, do what I want, then re-open them again.

For example, if I enter:
to get the equation I earlier posted, I might instead enter:
to get this equation:



Note that it is now numbered on the right.

Jon