Shown HN: texit - Embed LaTeX anywhere on the web | Hacker News Reader

Shown HN: texit - Embed LaTeX anywhere on the web

github.com

67 pointszachlatta27 comments

This uses Mathjax: http://www.texpaste.com/

What is the advantage of rendering math as images when Mathjax works reasonably well on all modern browsers.

I agree. MathJax renders this both pointless and outdated. All my recent articles use MathJax and I wouldn't dream of going back to graphics for equation rendering.

Don't be mean. Calling someone's work "pointless and outdated" when they were looking forward to featuring it on HN is just brutal.

> Calling someone's work "pointless and outdated" when they were looking forward to featuring it on HN is just brutal.

Yes, like reality. Maybe the OP will use his natural gifts to think of a way to answer brutality with creativity. That will prepare him for a more direct experience of reality, the kind where people pay you for your work, not because they're compelled to do so, but because they have no choice -- they want what you have, and you deserve to be compensated.

> Yes, like reality

Somehow everyone thinks their opinion is reality.

>> Yes, like reality

> Somehow everyone thinks their opinion is reality.

It's not an opinion. Investors and customers are a better measure of reality than a charitable remark might lead one to believe.

This isn't pointless, as it allows you to easily post latex equations on any site that allows images.

Yes, true, but isn't this project meant to populate a Website's pages with equations?

There are any number of easy ways to create equation images solely for export to an image site, example http://arachnoid.com/latex . But populating Web pages for display is a different issue, and the fact that modern browsers allow zooming in and out, essentially ruins the appearance of graphic equations.

This would mainly be used for posting to sites that allow images but not custom javascript. If you run your own site and can use MathJax, then you are fine but for others that cannot include the javascript (comments systems, social sites, etc.) this would be a nice alternative.

MathJax's HTML+CSS rendering looks much nicer than an image to me. I wish there was a way to run it on an HTML document in a batch fashion. (e.g. for generating an epub file)

Have you looked into pandoc?

Mathjax is great when applicable. My team and I built texit to allow us to take notes in Markdown, rather than writing them in pure LaTeX.

IPython notebooks already do that, with MathJax, plots, symbolic algebra, and full programming support too. What you've done is neat - I am all in favour of remaking things for fun (working on a grep clone...) - but it does seem like better alternatives already exist.

As someone who really enjoys taking notes in Markdown, and prefers it over most other alternatives, this is appreciated. Thanks for making this. I look forward to using it in class tomorrow.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ may be your best friend, in this case :) Here you can write in markdown and include TeX, thereafter converting to many different formats (using, for example, mimeTeX, MathJax, etc).

This does a couple of things -- rendering TeX, and plotting graphs. As has been pointed out, [MathJax](http://www.mathjax.org/) is really excellent, has thorough support for many of the TeX-isms which you may ever need, and is really simple to include by CDN. I suppose that the competition here is really [mimeTeX](http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html), since they both operate on the server-side, but MathJax is so very nice...

The plotting is interesting. These are REALLY basic plots, but I do not know of any other web service out there which implements plotting functionality on the server side. (There seem to be a few defunct gnuplot services; I cannot find a working one.) There are many client-side libraries for charts, but none which concentrate on plotting functions. I'm glad to see it here, but I would like to see it improved as well.

WordPress can render LaTeX since I can remember.

Example:

- http://l.wordpress.com/latex.php?latex=\displaystyle%20w_{a,...

- or a simpler one: http://l.wordpress.com/latex.php?latex=\frac{\pi}{2}&bg=ffff...

Can this be used as a full replacement of Google Chart Tool? [1]

[1] https://developers.google.com/chart/image/

http://latex.codecogs.com/svg.latex?\forall\alpha.(K_1^1[\al...

PS: It's $\LaTeX$, using $word$ is always wrong. And axis labes x and y should be in math italics.

Anyway it's just plain ugly, different fonts, formulae jumping from baseline etc. Use mathjax

Accessing LaTeX graphics features directly is really cool,I would just use numpy and d3.js or flotr or something.

Why not use the MathJaX CDN directly?

I even wrote an IDE (basically stolen from MathOverflow) to type markdown and have it render on the web. Sacrifice control of paragraph sizing etc.

This is good!

Would be great if it supports somehow retina display, maybe returning 2x size?

Good job!

We're experimenting with SVG support. As long as you're not specifying an extension when linking to texit, you should automatically be switched over to SVGs once they're implemented.

SVG support will be awesome. I've been trying to convert all my LaTex equations to svg for use in a desktop app. Looking forward to this

1. This is awesome. Could be really useful.

2. I'm not sure I would ever put it inside any of my web stuff however, because what happens when the service goes down, or disappears?

We're thinking about adding a system where you can associate your TeX images with a key, from which you can download all images associated with your project. It's in the pipeline, though. ;P

http://www.mashape.com/community/texit

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