Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Formulas in Blogger

To include formulas in blogger.com I have so far used mimetex which uses an external server running a cgi-script to convert TeX-style formulas to picutres.

This did its job most of the time except that mathphys, the old machine in Bremen that hosted my mimetex service died a couple of months ago and that the formulas have that stupid box around them which is particularly annoying for single symbols (this could probably be fixed by investing some time staring at the stylesheet for this blog). This is very much 8bit pixel style and does not scale nicely but I never touched it since it allowed you to read what I wrote.

Now, some reader suggested MathJax which I try out here:

Let's start witha wave function $\psi$, we define the velocity field $\vec v= \frac1{2m}\Im(\frac{\nabla \psi}{\psi})$. This leads to a conserved current:
$$\frac{\partial\rho}{\partial t}= -\vec\nabla\cdot (\bar\psi\psi\vec v).$$
At first, I thought it does not work but it just takes some time to reload.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a great plugin! The bottom edge of some characters seems to be cut off (at least on FF4/Linux).

Anonymous said...

Aha! The MathJax link in your post suggests downloading and installing the fonts manually. This indeed fixes the problem. Looks great now, and scales beautifully.

Anonymous said...

Formulae. I don't think languages win if everything is made completely regular and the origin of words is papered over.

Robert said...

Ok ok, I was in a rush.

Oxford Dictionaries: formula. The plural of formula can be spelled either formulae (like the original Latin) for mathematical or scientific senses, or formulas for more general senses.

Anonymous said...

what do you think about moving out to wordpress? Someone has made a program that allows you to write in latex and then just post it.

take a look http://lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/latex-to-wordpress/

cheers!