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mathML versus LaTeXRender

Published March 21, 2007 by lievenlb

No math
today. If you’re interested in the latest on noncommutative geometry,
head over to the NCG-blog where Alain Connes has a post on
Time.
Still, Alain’s post is a good illustration of what Ill be rambling about
TeX and how to use it in a blog.

If you’re running a math-blog,
sooner or later you want to say something more than new-age speak like
‘points talking to each other’ and get to the essence of it. In short,
you want to talk math and it’s a regrettable fact that math doesnt go
well with ASCII. In everyday life we found a way around this : we all
use TeX to write papers and even email-wise (among mathematicians) we
write plain TeX-commands as this language is more common to us than
English. But, plain TeX and the blogosphere don’t mix well. If you’re
expecting only professional mathematicians to read what you write, you
might as well arXiv your thoughts. Im convinced the majority of people
coming here (for whatever reason) dont speak plain-TeX. Fortunately,
there is technology to display TeX-symbols on a blog. Personally, I was
an early adapter to
LaTeXRender and even today a
fair share of page-views relates to the few
posts I did on
how to get latexrender working on a mac. Some time ago I
switched to mathML and now I’m
regretting I ever did…

Mind you, I’m convinced that mathML is the
‘proper’ way to get TeX to the internet but there are at the moment some
serious drawbacks. For starters, it is highly user-unfriendly. You
simply cannot expect people to switch browsers (as well as installing
extra fonts) just because they come to your site (or you have to be a
pretty arrogant git). Speaking for myself, Im still having (against my
better judgment) Safari as my default browser, so when I come to a site
like the n-category cafe I just
skim the plain-text in between and if (and only if) the topic interests
me tremendously I’ll allow myself to switch to Flock or Firefox to read
the post in detail. I’m convinced most of you have a similar
surfing-attitude. MathML also has serious consequences on the
server-side. If you want to serve mathML you have to emit headers which
expect everything to follow to be purified XHTML. If I ever forget a
closing tag in a post, this is enough to break down NeverEndingBooks to
all Firefox-users. I’ve been writing HTML since the times when the best
browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so Ive a
pretty lax attitude to end-tags (especially in IMG-tags) and Im just
getting too old to change these bad habbits now… It seems I’m not the
only one. Many developers of WordPress-plugins write bad XHTML-code, so
the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending more time fixing up code
than writing posts. If you want to run a mathML-wordpress site you might
find the following hints helpfull. If you get a ‘yellow screen of
death’ when viewing your site with Firefox, chances are that one of your
plugin-authors missed a closing tag in the HTML-rendering of his/her
plugin. As a rule of thumb : go for the IMG-tags first! I’m sorry to
say, but Latexrender-Steve
is among the XHTML-offenders. (On a marginal note, LaTeXrender also has
its drawbacks : to mathematicians this may seem incredible but what
Latexrender does to get one expression displayed is to TeX an entire
file, get the image from the ps-file turn it into a gif and display it,
so one gets a GIF-folder of enrmous proportions. Hence, use Latexrender
only if you have your own server and dont have to care about memory
constraints. Another disadvantedge was that the GIFs were displayed with
a vertical offset, but this has been solved recently (use the ‘offset
beta’ files in the distribution)). Wrt. to that offset-beta version, use
this latex.php file instead (I
changed the IMG-line). Some plugins may not serve the correct headers
to display mathML. So, if you want to allow readers to have a
printer-friendly version of your mathML-post, get the WP-print plugin BUT
change to this wp-print.php file in order to
send the proper headers. Sometimes there are just forgotten lines/tags
in the code, such as in the [future calendar plugin](http://anthologyoi.com/wordpress/plugins/future-posts-calendar-
plugin.html). So, please use this version
of the future.calendar.php file. And so on, and so on. The joys of
trying to maintain a mathML-based blog… So, no surprise I’m seriously
considering to ditch mathML and change to normal headers soon. One of
the things I like about LaTeXRender is that it can be extended, meaning
that you can get your own definitions and packages loaded whereas with
mathML you’re bound to write iTeX, which Ill never manage. But, again,
mathML will be the correct technology once all major browsers are mathML
capable and the font-problem is resolved. Does anyone know whether
Safari 3 (in Leopard, that is Mac OS 10.5 to the rest of you) will be
mathML-able?

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Latexrender and dvonn boards

Published January 9, 2006 by lievenlb

In order
to blog a bit about Dvonn-strategy, I made myself a simple Dvonn
LaTeX-template which works very well on paper but which gets mutilated
by Latexrender, for example the first situation of the looks
like

$~\xymatrix@=.3cm @!C @R=.7cm{ & & \Black{2} \connS & &
\bull{d}{5} \conn & & \bull{e}{5} \conn & & \bull{f}{5} \conn & &
\bull{g}{5} \conn & & \bull{h}{5} \conn & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite
\connS & & \SWhite \conneS & & \\ & \bull{b}{4} \conn & & \SBlack
\connS & & \Black{6} \connS & & \bull{e}{4} \conn& & \bull{f}{4} \conn &
& \bull{g}{4} \conn & & \bull{h}{4} \conn & & \SWhite \connS & &
\SWhite \connS & & \SWhite \conneS & \\ \SBlack \connbeginS & &
\SBlack \connS & & \BDvonn{7} \connS & & \bull{d}{3} \conn & & \SBlack
\connS & & \BDvonn{6} \connS & & \bull{g}{3} \conn & & \bull{h}{3}
\conn & & \Dvonn \connS & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite \connendS \\ &
\Black{5} \connbeginS & & \bull{b}{2} \conn & & \SBlack \connS & &
\bull{d}{2} \conn & & \bull{e}{2} \conn & & \bull{f}{2} \conn & &
\bull{g}{2} \conn & & \bull{h}{2} \conn & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite
\connendS & \\ & & \bull{a}{1} \con & & \bull{b}{1} \con & & \Black{5}
\conS & & \bull{d}{1} \con & & \bull{e}{1} \con & & \bull{f}{1} \con & &
\bull{g}{1} \con & & \bull{h}{1} \con & & \White{2} & &} $

The
reason behind this unwanted clipping is that Latexrender uses
**convert** to take the relevant part of a ps-page containing only the
TeXed formula on an empty page by performing clipping and then converts
it into a GIF-file (or any other format you desire). The obvious way
round this is to enlarge my template by adding two additional rows and
columns and putting visible nonsense there (such as dots) to enlarge the
relevant part so that no clipping is done of essential info. But then
(1) the picture generated becomes even larger than that above and (2) I
don’t want you to see the extra nonsensical dots… The essential line
in the **class.latexrender.php** file is

$command =
$this->_convert_path." -density ".$this->_formula_density.
" -trim -transparent \"#FFFFFF\" ".$this->_tmp_filename.".ps ".
$this->_tmp_filename.".".$this->_image_format;

So
I needed to delve into the [manual pages for the convert command](http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/software/man/convert.html)
of the ImageMagick-package. To my surprise, the *-trim* option (which I
thought to adjust somewhat by adding parameters) doesn’t exist! Still, I
got around my second problem using the *crop* option and around the
first by using the very useful *geometry* option. The latter is also
useful if you find that the size of the output of Latexrender is not
compatible with the size of your regular text. Of course you can amend
this somewhat by using the *extarticle* documentclass (as suggested) but
if you want to further adjust it, use for example

-geometry
86%

to size the output to exactly 86% (or whatever you need).
So, whenever I want to do some Dvonn-blogging from now on I’ll change my
class.latexrender.php file as follows

$command =
$this->_convert_path." -crop 0x0-10% -crop 0x0+10% -density
".$this->_formula_density. " -geometry 80%
-transparent \"#FFFFFF\" ".$this->_tmp_filename.".ps ".
$this->_tmp_filename.".".$this->_image_format;

which
produces the output

$\xymatrix@=.3cm @R=.7cm{.& & & & & & & & & &
& & & \\ & & & \Black{2} \connS & & \bull{d}{5} \conn & & \bull{e}{5}
\conn & & \bull{f}{5} \conn & & \bull{g}{5} \conn & & \bull{h}{5} \conn
& & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite \conneS & & & \\ & &
\bull{b}{4} \conn & & \SBlack \connS & & \Black{6} \connS & &
\bull{e}{4} \conn& & \bull{f}{4} \conn & & \bull{g}{4} \conn & &
\bull{h}{4} \conn & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite
\conneS & & \\ & \SBlack \connbeginS & & \SBlack \connS & &
\BDvonn{7} \connS & & \bull{d}{3} \conn & & \SBlack \connS & &
\BDvonn{6} \connS & & \bull{g}{3} \conn & & \bull{h}{3} \conn & &
\Dvonn \connS & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite \connendS & . \\ & &
\Black{5} \connbeginS & & \bull{b}{2} \conn & & \SBlack \connS & &
\bull{d}{2} \conn & & \bull{e}{2} \conn & & \bull{f}{2} \conn & &
\bull{g}{2} \conn & & \bull{h}{2} \conn & & \SWhite \connS & & \SWhite
\connendS & & \\ & & & \bull{a}{1} \con & & \bull{b}{1} \con & &
\Black{5} \conS & & \bull{d}{1} \con & & \bull{e}{1} \con & &
\bull{f}{1} \con & & \bull{g}{1} \con & & \bull{h}{1} \con & & \White{2}
& & & \\ . & & & & & & & & & & & & & } $

which (I hope) you will
find slightly better…

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latexrender plugin for wordpress under tiger

Published September 5, 2005 by lievenlb

Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken, a wiser man once
said. Still, promises have a much longer life-span and sometimes their
real content becomes redundant over time.

A year ago, I
promised
to document how I got the
LaTeXRender Plugin for WordPress working under OS X. The procedure
consisted of some trial-and-error operations, installing non-standard
versions of software and hardcoding certain directories throughout
certain files…

Not something I was looking forward
to when I decided to upgrade this WordPress blog but,
surprisingly, things went pretty smoothly this time (Mac-technology
has improved a lot). So, please don’t worry too much about this
post and follow the (late) instructions below.

First
things first : I will assume you have the ‘generic’ LaTeX
running under Tiger (10.4),that is, use the i-Installer to download BOTH
LaTeX and Imagemagick! Further, in order to get WordPress up and
running, have the standard
MySQL 4.0 package installed for 10.3 (not version
4.1…) and don’t use the generic Mac-PHP version, but
instead download Marc
Liyanage’s PHP5 package which has plenty of additional
packages installed (notably, GDlib and MCRYPT which comes in handy if
you want to fight spam-comments using BotCheck).

\r
\n

Download wp-
latexrender.zip and follow the instructions given to the letter
(there is one undocumented extra directory you have to fill in at the
start of the latexrender-plugin.php file). There is
just one additional thing to do. Find in the
class.latexrender.php file the line starting
with

// convert dvi file to postscript using
  dvips

and include the following lines just before it
: 

// begin of workaround // extending the PATH
  environmental variable Soldpath =
  getenv(“PATH”); Swhere_imagemagick_is =
  “/usr/local/bin”; if (Soldpath) { Swhere_imagemagick_is .=
  “:Soldpath”;} putenv(“PATH=Swhere_imagemagick_is”); //
  end of workaround

activate the plugin and it
should work! Still, there are three things you may want to change. In
the latex.php file uncomment the indicated lines as
you will be using htmlArea to input your posts. In addition, if you
have the MarkDown-plugin enabled, it is best to append additional
lines such as

 Slatex_formula =
  str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula);     Slatex_formula
  =
  str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula);

(
between the first ” ” should be the beginning and end
em-tag respectively) or underscores will be interpreted as em-tags.
If you run into additional similar problems, the procedure is to
comment-out the line

 
  unlink(Sthis->_tmp_dir.”/”.Sthis->_tmp_filename.”.tex”);

near the end of class.latexrender.php , look in the
tmp directory for the TeX-file, detect the problem and add similar
lines to the ones above to solve it. Another useful thing to do
is to add TeX-packages in the class.latexrender.php file. My own
version has the following predefined symbols and loaded
packages 

 function wrap_formula(Slatex_formula) { 
  Sstring  =
  “\\documentclass[“.Sthis->_font_size.”pt]{“.Sthis->_latexclass
  .”}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{amsmath}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{amsfonts}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{amssymb}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{xy}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\xyoption{all}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\vtx}[1]{*+[o][F-]{Scriptscriptstyle
  #1}}\\n”;  Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}c}{\\Bbbk}\\n”; 
  Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}}{\\mathbb{C}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Q}}{\\mathbb{Q}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Z}}{\\mathbb{Z}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{N}}{\\mathbb{N}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbf}[1]{{\\\\text{\\em \\usefont{OT1}{cmtt}{m}{n}
  #1}}}\\n”;  Sstring .= “\\pagestyle{empty}\\n”;  Sstring
  .= “\\begin{document}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “S”.Slatex_formula.”S\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\end{document}\\n”;          return Sstring;     }

which, among other things, allow all commenters to add
quiver-pictures using xymatrix and vtx to depict vertices. Oh yes, you
can allow comments to include LaTeX-code by uncommenting the
line 

  // add_filter(‘comment_text’,
  ‘addlatex’);

in the latexrender-plugin.php
file (but before you do make sure you have spam under control, such as
with BotCheck mentioned above). That’s all for now. If you want
to use TeX in a comment, make sure to put the code between tags [ tex
] and [ /tex ] (omitting the extra spaces). If you want me to add
other LaTeX-packages, leave a comment.

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LatexRender plugin for wordpress under Panther

Published August 31, 2004 by lievenlb

After
three days of desperate trial-and-error I seem to have managed to get latexrender working for
wordpress under Mac
OS X.
First things first : if you only want to include some
symbols in your blog-posts the easiest way to do so is to use mimetex and the
corresponding
wordpress-plugin written by Steve Mayer. Follow the
instructions and you will be able to include a limited subset of LaTeX
in your blog within 10 minutes.
If you want more, you have to
work a lot harder. The starting point is to follow Steve’s
blog-entries on latexrender
.
But then under Mac OS X you will probably get error messages
when you activate the plugin. The reason seems to be that most versions
of imagemagick available for
OS X require X-terminal support and PHP gets confused between the two
shells. A typical error message is

Warning:
copy(70afbabac176169545d01f4bd91f3055.gif): failed to open

stream:
No such file or directory in
/Users/lieven/Sites/wordpress/latexrender/class.latexrender.php on
line

269

[Unparseable or potentially dangerous latex
formula. Error 6 ]

As suggested by Steve Mayer there are
two roads to obtain more information on what goes wrong. The first is to
uncomment the _unlink commands _ at the end of the
_class.latexrender.php_ file and look in the _wordpress/latexrender/tmp_
directory for which conversions were done and which failed. The normal
latexrender-procedure is : tex->dvi->ps->gif. Probably you will
get all files but the gifs!

Another (and more useful) source of
informations is to look in the _error-log_ of the Apache-WebServer and
see whether you get things like

This is dvips(k) 5.94a
Copyright 2003 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
\\’
TeX output 2004.08.30:1433\\’ ->
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.ps

. [1]
sh: line 1:
gs: command not found
convert: no decode delegate for this image
format

/Users/lieven/Sites/weblog/latexrender/tmp/
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.ps\\’.

convert: missing an image
filename/Users/lieven/Sites/weblog/latexrender/tmp/
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\\’.

identify: unable to
open image 0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\\': No such file
or directory.
identify: missing an image
filename0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\\’.

`

Here the essential point is that the webserver doesn’t
seem to be able to find GhostScript (even if you have several versions
installed).

To bypass these problems I did two essential
things : (1) in the _class.latexrender.php_ file I rewrote the
conversions so as to use _pdflatex_ instead of tex (to get
immediately a pdf-file rather than the tex->dvi->ps process) and then
use _convert_ to translate this pdf-file into a gif-file. (2) the
version of _convert_ and _include_ (both part of the
ImageMagick package) are those provided by Fink but you should be extremely
careful to install the imagemagick-nox package and not
the imagemagick package! After the command
sudo fink
install imagemagick-nox
you are presented with several
configuration choices. Do _not_ choose on auto-pilot the default
choices but look for options specifying that there is no X-support!
After this, everything should work. If you want to have a look at how
I changed the PHP files, mail
me.

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wp-latex’ sweet revenge : wp+MathJax-> ePub

Published September 5, 2011 by lievenlb

In the early days of math-blogging, one was happy to get LaTeXRender working. Some years later, the majority of math-blogs were using the, more user-friendly, wp-latex plugin to turn LaTeX-code into png-images. Today, everyone uses MathJax which works with modern CSS and web fonts instead of equation images, so equations scale with surrounding text at all zoom levels.

However, MathJax has one downside : it doesn’t parse in ePub-readers. Peter Krautzberger wrote a post Epub and mathematics in which he suggested two methods to turn MathJax into ePub, but after dozens of experiments I still fail to reproduce these.

No doubt, someone will soon come up with a working alternative, but for the impatient here’s a quick but dirty method to turn your MathJax powered wordpress post into ePub :

the tools

  • download and install the ePub export plugin. It automatically creates an ePub file when a post or page is published or updated. The ePubs are stored in the uploads directory (to be found in the wp-contents directory).
  • download and install the wp-latex plugin. MathJax uses the normal \$ tex-delimeters whereas wp-latex requires \$latex, so this plugin doesn’t interfere with the default use of MathJax.
  • download the wp2latex python script. It converts a standard LaTeX file into a format that is ready to be copied into WordPress.

the routine

  • Edit the post you want to convert to ePub. Copy the contents of the post box to a file say post1.tex and save this in the same directory containing the latex2wp.py script.
  • In Terminal go to that directory and type the command ‘python latex2wp.py post1.tex’. It will produce a new file post1 in the same directory.
  • Copy the contents of post1 into the post box of your WordPress-post and press the update button. This time the TeX-commands in your post will be rendered using wp-latex and the ePub export-plugin will have created an ePub-version of it.
  • Locate this newly created ePub file in the relevant wp-contents/uploads/ folder (file has a number.epub name) and, if wanted, change its name into something easier to recognize and copy it somewhere outside the uploads directory. This will be your desired ePub-version of the post.
  • Replace the contents of the post box of your WordPress-post with the contents of the post1.tex file and hit the ‘Update’ button, to restore your original post (powered by MathJax).
  • Email your ePub-file to your iPad and open it with iBooks. Not quite as nice as MathJax-parsed TeX but a lot better than reading unparsed TeX-commands.
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changes (ahead)

Published January 19, 2011 by lievenlb

In view or recents events & comments, some changes have been made or will be made shortly :

categories : Sanitized the plethora of wordpress-categories to which posts belong. At the moment there are just 5 categories : ‘stories’ and ‘web’ (for all posts with low math-content) and three categories ‘level1’, ‘level2’ and ‘level3’, loosely indicating the math-difficulty of a post.

MathJax : After years of using LatexRender and WP-Latex, we’ll change to MathJax from now on. I’ll try to convert older posts as soon as possible. (Update : did a global search and replace. ‘Most’ LaTeX works, major exceptions being matrices and xymatrix commands. I’ll try to fix those later with LatexRender.)

theme : The next couple of days, the layout of this site may change randomly as I’ll be trying out things with the Swift wordpress theme. Hopefully, this will converge to a new design by next week.

name : Neverendingbooks will be renamed to something more math-related. Clearly, the new name will depend on the topics to be covered. On the main index page a pop-up poll will appear in the lower right-hand corner after 10 seconds. Please fill in the topics you’d like us to cover (no name or email required).

This poll will close on friday 21st at 12 CET and its outcome will influence name/direction of this blog. Use it also if you have a killer newname-suggestion. Among the responses so far, a funnier one : “An intro to, or motivation for non-commutative geometry, aimed at undergraduates. As a rule, I’d take what you think would be just right for undergrads, and then trim it down a little more.”

guest-posts : If you’d like to be a guest-blogger here at irregular times, please contact me. The first guest-post will be on noncommutative topology and the interpretation of quantum physics, and will appear soon. So, stay tuned…

2 Comments

Snow leopard + wordpress + latex problem

Published October 1, 2009 by lievenlb

Ever since I’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been having problems with the webserver.

At first there were the ‘obvious’ problems : mysql-connection lost and php-error message. These were swiftly dealt with using the excellent Snow Leopard, Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress! advice from ‘tady’.

Right now, access to this blog is extremely slow (and often impossible), certainly via the admin-page. The problem appears to be that most of my CPU is used by lots of pdfetex-processes owned by www. Hence the conjecture that it is a problem with either LaTeXRender or WP LaTeX.

Anyone experiencing a similar problem, or knowing a trick to resolve it? Takk.

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math2.0-setup : final comments

Published February 26, 2009 by lievenlb

Last time I promised to come back explaining how to set-up LaTeX-support, figuring I had to tell you about a few modifications I had to make in order to get Latexrender run on my mac…

A few google searches made it plain how out of touch I am on these matters (details below). But first, there was this comment to this series by Link Starbureiy :

“I took part in Gowers’ blog discussion. My input was to move things over to Google collaboration tools, like Google Knol, and perhaps Google Sites. However, those tools for large-scale collaboration may not be the best solution anymore. I like the NSN idea, but worry about it’s very long-term stability. Would you consider porting the project over to the Google App Engine so that it can be played with in the orkut sandbox (http://sandbox.orkut.com)?”

I thought I made it clear from the outset that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life web-mastering a site such as NSN. All I wanted to show is that the technology is there free for the taking, and show that you do not have to be a wizard to get it running even on a mac…

I would really love it when some groups, or universities, on institutes, would set up something resembling this dedicated to a single arXiv-topic. Given our history, Antwerp University might be convinced to do this for math.RA but (a) I’m not going to maintain this on my own and (b) there may very well be a bandwidth problem if such a thing would become successful… (although, from past experiences and attempts I’ve made over the years, this is extremely unlikely for this target-group).

So please, if your group has some energy to spare, set-up your own math2.0-network, port it to Google Apps, Knol, Orkut or whatever, and I’d love to join and contribute to it.

As to LaTeX-support : this is trivial these days. First you need a working LaTeX-system on your virgin macbook. The best way is to download The MacTeX-2008 Distribution at work (it is a huge 1.19Gb download…). Next, install the fauxml-wordpress plugin (that is, download it to YourHome/Downloads and then drag the file faux-ml.php to the Library/WebServer/Documents/wp-content/plugins/ directory. Next, install likewise the WP-LateX plugin following the instructions, go to the configuring page and set the directory for latex and dvipng (if you follow my instructions they should be located at /usr/texbin/latex and /usr/texbin/dvipng), fill in the text color and background color you desire and clip your default latex-documentstyle/includepackages/newcommands section from your latest paper into the LaTeX Preamble window and believe me, you’re done!!!



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Writing & Blogging

Published February 27, 2008 by lievenlb

Terry Tao is reworking some of his better blogposts into a book, to be published by the AMS (here’s a preliminary version of the book “What’s New?”)

After some thought, I decided not to transcribe all of my posts from last year (there are 93 of them!), but instead to restrict attention to those articles which (a) have significant mathematical content, (b) are not announcements of material that will be published elsewhere, and (c) are not primarily based on a talk given by someone else. As it turns out, this still leaves about 33 articles from 2007, leading to a decent-sized book of a couple hundred pages in length.

If you have a blog and want to turn it into a LaTeX-book, there’s no need to transcribe or copy every single post, thanks to the WPTeX tool. Note that this is NOT a WP-plugin, but a (simple at that) php-program which turns all posts into a bookcontent.tex file. This file can then be edited further into a proper book.

Unfortunately, the present version chokes on LaTeXrender-code (which is easy enough to solve doing a global ‘find-and-replace’ of the tex-tags by dollar-signs) but worse, on Markdown-code… But then, someone fluent in php-regex will have no problems extending the libs/functions.php file (I hope…).

At the moment I’m considering turning the Mathieu-games-posts into a booklet. A possible title might be Mathieumatical Games. Rereading them (and other posts) I regret to be such an impatient blogger. Often I’m interested in something and start writing posts about it without knowing where or when I’ll land. This makes my posts a lot harder to get through than they might have been, if I would blog only after having digested the material myself… Typical recent examples are the tori-crypto-posts and the Bost-Connes algebra posts.

So, I still have a lot to learn from other bloggers I admire, such as Jennifer Ouellette who maintains the Coctail Party Physics blog. At the moment, Jennifer is resident blogger-journalist at the Kavli Institute where she is running a “Journal Club” workshop giving ideas on how to write better about science.

But the KITP is also committed to fostering scientific communication. That’s where I come in. Each Friday through April 26th, I’ll be presiding over a “Journal Club” meeting focusing on some aspect of communicating science.

Her most recent talk was entitled To Blog or Not to Blog? That is the Question and you can find the slides as well as a QuickTime movie of her talk. They even plan to set up a blog for the participants of the workshop. I will surely follow the rest of her course with keen interest!

3 Comments

thanks for linking

Published January 11, 2008 by lievenlb

I’ve re-installed the Google analytics plugin on december 22nd, so it is harvesting data for three weeks only. Still, it is an interesting tool to gain insight in the social networking aspect of math-blogging, something I’m still very bad at…

Below the list of all blogs referring at least 10 times over this last three weeks. In brackets are the number of referrals and included are the average time Avg. they spend on this site, as well as the bounce back rate BB. It gives me the opportunity to link back to some of their posts, as a small token of gratitude. I may repeat this in the future, so please keep on linking…

Not Even Wrong (69) : Avg (1.05 min) BB (52.94%)

The most recent post of Peter is an update on the plagiarism scandal on the arXiv.

The n-category cafe (63) : Avg (2.13 min) BB (50%)

The one series I followed at the cafe lately was the Geometric Representation Theory course run by John Baez and James Dolan. They provide downloadable movies as well as notes.

Richard Borcherd’s blog (47) : Avg (1.53 min) BB (53.19%)

It is great to see that Borcherds has taken up blogging again, with a post on the uselessness of set theory.

The Arcadian functor (32) : Avg (3.45 min) BB (34.38 %)

It is clear from the low bounce-back rate and the high average time spend on this site, that Kea’s readers and mine have common interests. Often I feel that Kea and I are talking about the same topics, but that our language is so different, that it is difficult for me to spot the precise connection. I definitely should start (for myself) a translation-project of her M-theory posts.

RupertGee’s iBlog (23) : Avg (6.48 min) BB (34.7 %)

Surprisingly, and contrasting to my previous rant iTouch-people (or at least those coming here from Rupert Gee’s blog) sure take time to read the posts and look for more.

Ars Mathematica (22) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (77,2 %)

Well, the average time and bounce back rate say it all : people coming here from Ars Mathematica are not interested in longer posts…

iTouch Fans Forum (14) : Avg (2:07 min) BB (42.86 %)

Again, better statistics than I would have expected.

Vivatsgasse 7 (13) : Avg (1:51 min) BB (38.46 %)

I hope these guys haven’t completely given up on blogging as it is one of my favourites.

Sixth form mathematics (12) : Avg (1:40 min) BB (25 %)

My few old posts on LaTeXrender still draw referrals…

Strategic Boards (12) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (91.67 %)

People in strategic board games are not really in my game-posts it seems…

The Everything Seminar (11) : Avg (2:04 min) BB (72.73 %)

Greg Muller has been posting a couple of nice posts on chord diagrams, starting here.

Noncommutative Geometry (11) : Avg (3:36 min) BB (27.27 %)

Well, we are interested in the same thing viewed from different angles, so good average times and a low bounce back rate. Maybe, I should make another attempt to have cross-interaction between the two blogs.

7 Comments

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