A WYSIWYG math editor | Hacker News Reader

A WYSIWYG math editor

coding.net

64 pointstvvocold21 comments

Well gave up trying to run or preview this math editor. Also its using MathJax which is already known to be very slow compared to roll your own or Katex.

I guess I'll stick with MathQuill which lets you preview as you type. http://mathquill.com/

MathJax is definitely slower, but KaTeX never got the developer attention it deserves, and so still lags in support of even some basic LaTeX environments that are used fairly frequently in math typesetting. Generally the order for software is 1) make it work, 2) make it fast, 3) clean it up, so starting with MathJax makes a lot of sense.

My absolute favourite still is https://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php, which is super fast, and has a nicely big input box so you can see all the text you've written, with all the convenient buttons for picking that function of which you can't for the life of you remember the exact syntax. WYSIWYG kind of falls flat when there is so much syntax you can't reasonably be expected to remember all of it.

KaTeX is still being developed (https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX). They support the "align" environment now, which is all I really needed.

They don't support linebreaks though. We would love to switch to KaTeX but the lack of linebreaks, among probably others, is a deal breaker. Working with MathJax is awful.

I can't read Chinese, but I'll just throw out that Lyx has a fairly great wysiwyg equation editor. It's sort-of latex based which makes it easy to input stuff, but you can actually see the equation unlike in normal Latex which is pretty unreadable.

I suspect the awful loading time on both the demo and the repo is this code is sitting in mainland China. I haven't even been able to see the demo

There is no license included and non of the dependencies are included in the package.json. Still trying to get it to run locally just to see if there is anything of interest here.

So, China has its own github, probably due to the GFW and due to better l10n. How popular is coding.net compared to github?

Alexa.com is great for these kind of questions. coding.net has a global rank of 15,497 (and falling somewhat fast), github.com has a global rank of 61 and has been stable if somewhat declining.

Github is not blocked by the GFW. I've never heard of coding.net before, most people here use github in my experience.

It has been blocked by the GFW a few times. I guess having it go down like that unpredictably would push people towards coding.net? But the l10n is probably a much bigger factor for why anyone would use coding.net?

It's more than that. https://Coding.net is a cloud development platform that enables developers do all the work in a browser (include free private repositories, WebIDE, powerful GTD tools, programmer community...).

Also, CODING runs a marketplace (https://mart.coding.net) to help developers find matching software requirements and make the deal. We will be rolling out the English version of our site in this year, so stay tuned:)

So do you comply with Chinese censorship better than github does?

It was very difficult to guess how to use this. Consider adding a translation to English of the essential parts. (Disclaimer: I speak Spanish natively, but English will get you more world coverage.)

After some tries, I reach this steps to get a formula:

1) Open the demo: http://matheditor.coding.io/

2) Press the Omega (a gray box appears)

3) Press: 2 + x _ 5 (wait half a second between each character)

4) I got this: http://imgur.com/vtZZtrl

I generally just use [1]. Press the `fx` button and you can construct equations using the GUI that work in LaTeX. And if you click on the image and copy the address, you can send the (very long) link to a friend and share the equations too.

[1]: https://latex.codecogs.com/

http://matheditor.coding.io/ for the demo

Looks interesting, but a better loading indicator might be good. I opened this page, and got confused, until I looked at my browser's tab bar, and noticed it was still loading.

I living in China.

So,Two point want to say.

1. That site user all are super idiot & newbe.

2. This stuff is super super super super RUBBISH.

I also can't understand, why this stuff has Favorite in HN Twitter accounts.

A bit surprised to see a Chinese project on coding.net on HN. Applause!

That said I am constantly stuck in a state where I cannot backspace to delete what I wrote.

Hmm the live example wasn't working for me :c.

This is comical compared to mathquill

Never loads.

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