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?
arxiv, Connes, geometry, latex, latexrender, Leopard, mac, noncommutative, wordpress
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Posted in iMath, mac, rants
Written on Wed, 21 March 2007 at 1:16 pm
Tags: arxiv, Connes, geometry, latex, latexrender, Leopard, mac, noncommutative, wordpress
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