LaTeX not working in Mathematics forum

Michael Collins

Hi all,

I've raised this issue a few times as I think its really holding back the Mathematics forum:

It used to be that one could use [ latex ] [ /latex ] tags (without the spaces) and then type LaTeX code between them to generate maths equations that look nice.

Unfortunately this was done by linking to an external server (www.mathtran.org), which for the last few years has been patchy, and is now gone completely.

This leaves a history of maths threads rather unreadable, see an old post of mine here, for example:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=68782941&postcount=18

And there are many more examples of this.

Is there anything we can do? As far as I'm aware there exist a number of plugins out there that can do this kind of thing...

Here's a well-implemented (using MathJax) example of the above, from the physicsforums.com.:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/decibel-intensity-level-question.925032/ (See 2nd post, by NFuller.)

If you right-click on an equation on that page, and select "Show Math As..." and choose "TeX Commands", you can see the code that is required to generate the image.

This code is well-known to many people in ICT and beyond.

Please put this on the agenda!

Boards.ie: Mark

When I last looked into it, we found that there are parsers that we may be able to look into integrating at some stage. But at the moment our dev team are really busy with a few projects, so won't be able to get to it for a while.

In the meantime, it's recommended that people use something like http://latex2png.com/ and then upload that via the Manage Attachments button when creating a post. If you could try this out and let me know how well it works; I don't have the expertise, I'm afraid, so while it looks good in theory, I'm not 100% certain of how good it is in practice.

I don't think that there's anything that could be done about old posts / threads unless someone was to go through them and update them using the above method (if that worked out). That's the drawback of using anything third party - we don't have the same level of control which can cause issues, as we've seen with images on Photobucket most recently.

My colleague who I was asking about this is off today, but can take a look again on Monday.

Michael Collins

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply, I think we discussed this before when I raised this with Black Swan (CMod for Science) and you suggested http://latex2png.com/ then - I have a few posts in mind, so I will try what you suggest.

But I do feel that it's a poor substitute for being able to write LateX code directly inline on boards.ie (especially for those on the old site that would have to upload these imagines individally and link to them).

Writing maths posts can be quite time-consuming in the first place, so adding extra steps is likely to turn people off.

I'm happy to help in any way. At the very least I would be happy to write some instructions/tutorials on the Maths forum to help popularise any new boards.ie LateX entry method.

Here's another site that generates a LateX image on the fly that one can use on boards.ie and it tends to look well (although unlike your suggestion, this puts all posts at the mercy of Codecogs.com).

http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php

On the old posts, a lot of them may just work with a new parser, since LateX code is universal - i.e. just pass whatever is between the [ LateX ] tags to the new parser, and it should give the correct equation.