Totally Stoked

September 3, 2007 6:49 AM

Texify is a pretty convenient web-based way to typeset LaTeX equations (and get a linkable image).
posted by Wolfdog (10 comments total)

Ah, Latex. Everything that's good and everything that's bad about Open Source, rolled into one.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 7:01 AM on September 3, 2007

This will be sweet for when I need to typset LaTeX equations
posted by poppo at 7:02 AM on September 3, 2007

Rad! I mispent too many hours of my innocent youth on Latex2HTML to not appreciate this. I'm a fan of the MathML approach - as contrasted with the image generation used here - for philosophical reasons these days. That said, I don't think the former is quite ready for "production" use, while this looks pretty solid.

LaTeX and in general, semantic markup and decent rendering for grownups, are how things ought to work. I guess I sorta agree with T.O.C.Tim, but I feel the recipe is like 90% goodness and 5% badness (there's 5% lost in overhead making a specialty layout for the ingredients list).
posted by freebird at 7:21 AM on September 3, 2007

Nice, but the antialiasing needs some work.
posted by edd at 7:24 AM on September 3, 2007

I was thinking the same thing about the anti-aliasing. There is also this online typesetter to PNG, but it currently has the times-new-roman package enabled so all the output is uglified.
posted by virga at 7:27 AM on September 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Too bad we can't embed images
posted by null terminated at 7:31 AM on September 3, 2007 [2 favorites]

Decent, but notice the difference between the following:

http://www.texify.com/$H\Psi=\imath\hbar\frac{\partial\Psi}{\partial{t}}$

and

http://www.texify.com/$H\Psi=\imath\hbar\frac{\partial\Psi}{\partial t}$

The latter (auto 'non-clickable') one is what TEXIFY produces, presently. It's non-clickable as far as the automatic HTML mark-up in the emails I send go.

A simple way to avoid it would be to use the former equation-URL or

http://www.texify.com/$H\Psi=\imath\hbar\partial_{t}\Psi$

However, this is great if you have ever had to communicate equations through email. :-) Double-plus.
posted by quanta and qualia at 9:16 AM on September 3, 2007

Awesome. Also, good title.
posted by DU at 9:30 AM on September 3, 2007

And if you, like me, don't think in TeX, this free Equation Editor that interoperates with Microsoft's (and works like it too), can spit out TeX.
posted by costas at 11:48 AM on September 3, 2007

Cool stuff, finally I will be able to include equations into my email messages!
posted by Rudy_Wurlitzer at 8:41 AM on September 5, 2007