Monday, August 10, 2009

LaTeX-enabled Anonymous Message Boards

I find a lot of the time that I want to ask a stupid question online but don't want my name attached to it. Solution: LaTeX-enabled, optionally anonymous online message boards! To be fair they're really better for just asking quick questions in general. If I have a weird problem on a software project, I can often just pop over to IRC and ask some basic questions, but there's not really a good analogue for math.

I built these myself so they're liable to be a little shaky. I'd appreciate any feedback, and I'll also try to answer any questions you post there, assuming I know how to answer them. To post in LaTeX, just do something like:

How do I know that $\sup \left\{ \int f d\mu : f \leq \phi, \phi \text{ simple}\right\}$ exists?

And nobody will be able to make fun of you for not understanding integration, because they won't know who you are.

11 comments:

Bob Mathews said...

Looks like a really useful project. There are plenty of math help forums with LaTeX support already, but an anonymous one is nice.

It's not the LaTeX itself that is displayed, of course, but an image created from the LaTeX code. I'd like to point out, for anyone who has MathType, you can either copy & paste the image into MathType, or drag it into an open MathType window. You can then edit it if you want, and use it just like any other MathType equation -- in Word, PowerPoint, etc.

For those who don't want to learn LaTeX, but want to post on the message boards, you can also compose an equation in MathType and translate it into LaTeX.

Daniel McLaury said...

So the program you're talking about does OCR on equations? Interesting.

Bob Mathews said...

Not OCR -- the images on the message board have LaTeX in the "alt text" attribute of the IMG tag. It's this alt text that MathType is able to use. It does the same thing with equations displayed on Wikipedia, PlanetMath, Math Help Forum, and lots of other sites.

Daniel McLaury said...

Ah. In that case would you mind testing the alt text on those boards for compatibility with your product? I'd had some problems with it before (double-escaping slashes for one thing) which I think I've taken care of now.

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