Online LaTeX 2
Monday 4th June 2007
As mentioned in the previous post mimeTeX parses a LaTeX maths expression and immediately emits the corresponding gif image. All you need do is write <img src="http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi?c=\sqrt{a^2+b^2}" /> and you get the mathematical formula. It’s beautifully simple.
Following a suggestion by John Forkosh, the author of mimeTeX, I would like to do the same for LatexRender to help those who don’t have access to a LaTeX enabled server. I am looking for volunteers who are willing to host LatexRender on a publically available server, accessed in a similar manner to mimeTeX’s server. I doubt that it would need huge bandwidth but it does need a commitment to be available for use.
Do let me know if you are interested and can offer such a service.
11 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Steve — kudos on LatexRender; also, thanks for the list of resources in the last post.
My server, randall.nu, won’t be up forever, but I’m happy to host anything on it for the year or so that it’s up. I could create a subdomain (math.randall.nu?) that can point to my server for now but can be changed to point at someone else’s IP when I have to shut my server down.
While I’m here, I wanted to pimp a JavaScript and PHP hack I did based on mimeTeX. The author just needs to add a script tag pointing at my site, and the script will use my server to render text like “\[ \LaTeX \]” on their site or blog. The server side caches images after it first renders them, too. I don’t have tons of hours to devote to it, but I’m happy to share the JS and PHP or adapt it to use a public LatexRender server (whether I host that server or someone else does).
Random miscellanea: If this ends up having lots of users, it might be possible to move old images to Amazon’s S3 to get cheap bandwidth. If you haven’t seen ASCIIMath image fallback scripts or the amazing jsMath, check ’em out. Finally, my JS hack includes a very experimental stab at translating MathML to LaTeX with some free XSLT from a Russian university and a table of LaTeX symbols by the W3C.
Best,
Randall
Comment by Randall — Tuesday 5th June 2007 12:07 am #
I have a wordpress blog up alamin.ca ( would like to put up this plugin! )
do get back to me 🙂
Comment by Alamin — Wednesday 6th June 2007 4:27 pm #
Are you saying that you have LaTeX, ImageMagick and Ghostscript working on your server and are willing to write code for it that sends back an image when called from any other server? Thus LaTeX code would be sent to you, processed by LatexRender on your server and an image returned to the calling server.
Comment by Steve — Wednesday 6th June 2007 4:48 pm #
I’m currently experimenting with that mimetex server to fix old webpages that used the techexplorer plugin. It indeed works like a charm.
One caveat however: IE doesn’t like the backslashes. It thinks forward slashes are so much better.
Comment by Bramz — Friday 15th June 2007 12:41 pm #
Hello. I’m interested in be volunteer.
Comment by Janzo — Friday 28th September 2007 11:37 am #
Thanks very much for the offer. Do you have anything set up? You may wish to contact me directly via email – see readme_plugin.txt of the latexrender download for the address.
Comment by Steve — Friday 28th September 2007 11:52 am #
I’m interested too; if you do ever manage to get the public LaTeXRender server up and running, I can modify the code in the Equation Editor I have such that users can choose between using mimeTeX and LaTeXRender. 😀
Comment by thornahawk — Monday 1st October 2007 3:43 am #
I’m interested in this capability as well. I have a version of a Mimetex.cgi plugin written for the CMS Drupal, and caches the image sent by Mimetex.cgi locally so that the request to the CGI file (which I host locally) only happens the first time the page is loaded and thereafter the local server copy of the .gif file is used.
I’m sure it would be possible to do the same for the Latexrender public server. Maybe instead of seeking volunteers to host this on their server, we should create a foundation who’s role is to:
1. Promote the use of mathematical equations on the web
2. Provide a variety of methods of implementing equations in one’s web page.
3. Host a public version of the Latexrender and (attempt to) require users of it to cache the responses.
Such a foundation would have a low operating cost, just the cost of the server itself and perhaps some small development costs. Perhaps there is a university out there that could fund this foundation?
Comment by David — Friday 19th October 2007 1:17 am #
John Forkosh, the author of mimeTeX and mathTeX, has tried to persuade the TeX Users Group to host such a server but without success. A university would be a good idea as well.
Comment by Steve — Friday 19th October 2007 10:00 am #
Try this one:
http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?p_b=x^2
Found on
http://www.codecogs.com/components/equationeditor/equationeditor.php
The rendering is way better, isn’t it?
Greetings, Jonas
Comment by Jonas — Monday 23rd November 2009 3:19 am #
You’ll find that I have written about CodeCogs equation editor at CodeCogs Equation Editor and Online LaTeX. CodeCogs uses a revised version of LatexRender as its rendering engine.
Comment by Steve — Monday 23rd November 2009 10:05 am #