# LatexRender

I’ve just added LatexRender support to this weblog, using Steve Mayer’s WordPress plugin. In principle you should now be able to add formulas in TeX in the comments by putting the TeX in between [tex ] and [/tex ] (without the space).

Here’s an example of the output:

I fear this will undoubtedly require some further debugging, but no time for that right now.

Update: This is now long out of date. I’ve replaced LatexRender with MathJax support. The opening and closing delimiters for tex math are now ‘\$’ and for displayed math are “\$\\$”.

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### 38 Responses to LatexRender

1. woit says:

Let’s see if this works in the comments:

2. D R Lunsford says:

Did it work?

-drl

3. I know the post is in pt_br, but these “TeX” plugins for WP are really cool: Testing MathML.

4. antonio says:

5. Aaron says:

Hmmm. Without the spaces, I bet.

6. Anonymous Dude says:

Copy catting…

Neat! (assuming it worked)

7. D R Lunsford says:

Just an egregious editorial comment,

Markup languages are clunky and unreliable. This is a much better idea.

-drl

8. D R Lunsford says:

Quick! What’s the derivative of ?

-

Maybe formulas must fit into a single line. Let’s see what happens if we break up the offending input.

10. anon says:

11. FP says:

12. Aaron says:

I’m getting the feeling this new toy might need a preview button….

13. anon says:

14. Ugo says:

Its like christmas eve on midnight when the kids are busy playing with the new toys 🙂

15. ksh95 says:

this works or I give up

16. vk says:

hope it works .

17. woit says:

Unfortunately I don’t have time to debug what went wrong with people’s failed attempts to use this, so I just deleted them, to keep my server from continually having to run failed latex commands. I’ll leave the rest as examples of what can be done with this.

18. D R Lunsford says:

Don’t know if it’s related, but another post had all the text after a left angle bracket (less-than sign) deleted…

-drl

19. Carl says:

Carl

Eggs on my face. Tonight I used instead of [ ], which was eaten as unrecognized HTML tags, of course. Apologies to Peter for filling his comment section with nonsense, but I hope that he will clean up after me. A previewer would be much appreciated.

21. Some problems happen when you type < or &: Those are “special HTML entities” and do not get properly parsed by the plugin. In all fairness, i have not had any trouble with the <, but i have had the exact same trouble with tables when using &s in order to separate the fields.

Religious wars aside: DRL, MathML is pretty good… and if you use the plugin i mention on the link i sent [see my previous comment above], you won’t have much trouble.

22. Speaking of plugins, there is a podcast plugin around. http://aleph.llull.net/post-to-speech/

You could try to include TeX to Speech features 🙂

23. J.F. Moore says:

D.R. Lunsford,

Latex is a markup language.

Peter,

This is very neat, haven’t seen it before in a comment section.

24. D R Lunsford says:

JF, not in the context of a browser, any more than Postscript is. “Everyone knows this”. Congrats on being the third person this morning to say something idiotic!

This thing generates images and puts them in image tags.

-drl

25. woit says:

drl,

Please stop with the abuse of other commenters as idiots, save it for special occasions.

What is going on here is that the webserver is running latex, using a graphics manipulation program to turn the result into a gif graphics file, which then gets included in the page. Advantages: you don’t need any special fonts or plugins for your browser. Disadvantages: doesn’t scale properly, a search engine can’t get at the content, probably others.

26. Henrik says:

27. D R Lunsford says:

Peter, the other two were offsite.

-drl

28. Kasper Olsen says:

Nice, Peter – but I’m sure somebody already “proved” that it works…

Peter and everybody else: any similar software for use at blogger.cóm?

Best, Kasper

29. Who says:

Chris Beasley has posted a new Beasley-Witten paper
in case anyone is interested
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0512039
New Instanton Effects in String Theory

I assume some other blogs mentioned it but am having trouble
opening them, so can’t be sure. Is it news that Edward Witten
has coauthored a stringy paper? Don’t recall many such from him
recently.

30. D R Lunsford says:

Another supremely uninteresting paper without a millisecond expended on physical thought. To witness a genius like Witten produce this effluvia is analogous to watching some hypothetical Beethoven scribble down advertising jingles for an orchestra of detuned kazoos.

Not only is there no physics, but the paper’s English style is as deadly monotonous as VCR clock-setting instructions.

-drl

31. God says:

Lunsford, I notice that Woit comes in for criticism on Wikipedia for being needlessly kind to Witten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit

32. woit says:

Ugh,
It’s pretty annoying to see the Wikipedia entry containing Witten-bashing and descriptions of my research I don’t really agree with. Too busy right now, but I’ll have to see if I can get this changed.

33. logopetria says:

I’ve had a go at making a few (minor) improvements. Here’s a snapshot of the page as I left it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Woit&oldid=30491221

Took out the Witten-bashing, deleted the stuff about your research that was, I guess, unrepresentative, and replaced it with a couple of sentences from a post at this site. Hope that’s OK. Can’t claim that I’ve made the page better, but I hope I’ve made it less bad.

34. God says:

Logopetria,

Good, but you deleted the bits saying:

‘He argues that from the path integrals approach to quantum field theory, Euclidean four dimensional space makes the most sense, and Unitary group U(2) is a proper subset of Special Orthogonal group SO(4). Using a spin representation Spin(2n), U(2) gives the quantum numbers of a Standard Model generation of leptons. For a generation of quarks, the ‘vacuum’ vector transforms under Unitary group U(1) with charge 4/3, which makes the overall average U(1) charge of a generation of leptons and quarks zero.’

(that just summarises the ideas arrived at in hep-th/0206135) and

‘Witten, however, has his own share of crackpotism as the inventor of the mainstream string theory, ‘M-theory’, in 1995: ‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’ (Witten, April 1996 Physics Today.) Peter Woit avoids an outright condemnation of Witten.’

then you inserted a link to ‘The Holy Grail of Physics’, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3 which is a mud-wrestling argument between Woit and professor Srednicki!

35. Florifulgurator says:

Badly programmed thing! Last try, no & now. This is first time I TeX this century… Yay…

36. Florifulgurator says:

How to get \cr work??? 🙁

37. D R Lunsford says:

The Wikipedia is just more Internet-Googly trash on the level of flag-waving right-wing war manifesti and porn sites. How surprising that it should contain questionable material!

A venerated reporter, John Siegenthaler I believe was his name, was falsely accused on Wikipedia of participating in assassination plots! I would sooner read the National Inquirer than that pile of horse dung.

It’s remarkable how so-called “freedom of information” has corroded intellectual rigor so rapidly. Take a look at the stink wafting from Usenet if you’re not convinced.

-drl

38. Juan R. says:

A simple proof