Show HN: Markdown + LaTeX math in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Markdown + LaTeX math in the browser

socrates.io

121 pointspkrein32 comments

People in this thread may also find GmailTex useful. It's a browser plugin which enables using LaTeX syntax in Gmail and GChat.

http://alexeev.org/gmailtex.html

P.S.: This Socrates thing is pretty fantastic. Is there a keyboard shortcut for switching to the compiled view?

I tested it on Chromium (the FOSS version of Google Chrome), and in that browser, the math uses a much smaller font than the Firefox version. (Firefox looks "right.")

I'm using Linux Mint 14 (the most recent version), the default version of Chromium from the distribution's repo; all packages are up-to-date, and I don't have any browser extensions or any intense customization.

The Firefox version appears broken to me?

http://i.imgur.com/9eeSvlU.png

Firefox 19/OSX Lion

Same here with Chromium (23.0.1271.97-0ubuntu0.12.04.1)

Looks fine in Chrome / Mac OS X.

I recommend upgrading to the latest release of marked ( https://github.com/chjj/marked/tree/v0.2.8 ). It has a few improvements as well as GFM tables.

Beautiful! You wouldn't happen to know if it supports "smart" quotes would you? Been meaning to find one that does support those.

Also auto-id-ing heading elements so they can be hash-linked to? That's another of my marked requests.

> Beautiful! You wouldn't happen to know if it supports "smart" quotes would you?

Marked has a pretty big todo list right now. Those are on it somewhere.

> Also auto-id-ing heading elements so they can be hash-linked to?

This is actually requested less than I expected it to be, but I think I do want to add something for it in the future.

Oh nice, didn't make the connection that you were the maintainer ;)

Yeah id-ing of heading elements is something I really wish we had for our docs (https://segment.io/docs) because we have to break out of markdown for every header to make them linkable.

I just wish I knew enough to be able to contribute. That was my problem with Stylus too...

This is cool. I wanted to do a blog post on some real estate appraisal topics, which requires math examples. Is this open source? Where I can I find socrates.io - it goes straight to the interface.

Yup it is! On Github: https://github.com/segmentio/socrates

That's cool. I was using markable.in in last weeks. But lack of code highlighting and Mathjax brings socrates.io on the first place :)

I wrote a LaTeX Markdown plugin as well, but it served a different purpose. It was geared for offline documents.

https://github.com/justinvh/Markdown-LaTeX

It generates inline/base64-encoded images with a small file-cache for the generated images. Try it out!

There used to be a similar service at http://notepag.es/ However, it seems to be down now.

Really wish they used Pandoc Markdown or some other form of extended Markdown... then I could consider using it for real stuff,

Why not use jqMath? It's latex based, 10 times smaller, and 10 times faster than MathJax - which is aimed more at publishers.

Interesting. Looks like it maps TeX directly to HTML, so it must support fewer constructs? Or what are the downsides? Being 10x faster and 10x smaller without any drawbacks seems too good to be true.

"TeX-based" is the operative term here. The syntax is somewhat different true TeX (so it would drive people who use TeX regularly crazy, like me). And I don't believe it has the same abilities.

jqMath doesn’t use LaTeX.

I've been working on something just like this! It is a mashup of Ghost<john.onolan.org/ghost/>, and a editor like this. If you was to see the uncompleted version its here: http://quaz3l.github.com/ghost/g-admin/posts.html

If you think this is cool, check out http://spandex.io/

Oh man, this is really cool. Great job. I'm the co-founder of http://SpanDeX.io (which I see someone already commented about) and we love seeing this kind of stuff. Great to see LaTeX getting implemented in a really useful way!

In the end, how should I use this product? Writing Latex before compiling the final thing on your PC?

I wish it had better support for live editing, but this is really a limitation of MathJax / TeX in general. Still, I wonder if it might be possible to improve the experience a bit by e.g. only updating when I close a $$ block, etc.

That's what I was going to say. I found the constant reformatting of the math stuff in the right pane extremely jarring.

Otherwise, nice and simple.

yeah -- we'll try to smooth this out!

Does this mean you can only see the math in Socrates? How do you publish a page on the web outside Socrates?

this looks nice, but i'm confused.. how do i actually use it on my webpage?

It's a shame that there doesn't seem to be any export option.

That's something we've gotten a lot of requests for and want to build one of these weekends :)

This is great!!

LOVE it!

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