Widgets+and+Mathjax

[|More Information]     Mcos  2      ( //x// − 3 ) −    sin  2      ( //x// − <span class="mn" style="font-family: MathJax_Main; padding-left: 0.22em;">3 <span class="mo" style="font-family: MathJax_Main;">) <span class="mo" style="font-family: MathJax_Main; padding-left: 0.27em;">=cos <span class="mo" style="font-family: MathJax_Main;">( <span class="mn" style="font-family: MathJax_Main;">2 <span class="mi" style="font-family: MathJax_Math;">//x// <span class="mo" style="font-family: MathJax_Main; padding-left: 0.22em;">− <span class="mn" style="font-family: MathJax_Main; padding-left: 0.22em;">6 <span class="mo" style="font-family: MathJax_Main;">) ===Since this wiki was to help me work out the kinks, I keep a well maintained copy of this page at tysonadvancedtopics.wikispaces.com where I'll add in any updates etc. However, that wiki can only be edited by students in my class. I am leaving this copy here. I will try to keep it up to date. The advantage of this page is that anyone can edit it and see what we have done.===

Mathjax is a java applet that helps to display mathematics on the web by live translating LaTeX that it finds on the website. If you click on their logo above, you will go to their [|main webpage]. They have very good instructions for using Mathjax in a variety of contexts on the web. When I was having trouble making Mathjax work effectively in wikispaces, I found their help team to be prompt, thoughtful, and accurate. They answered numerous questions, and eventually directed me to this wiki entry by lfahlberg with a good explanation of what to do in the background of the wiki theme and appearence.

When I initially followed the Mathjax instructions as found on their webpage, I could enter equations into my text using LaTeX with the correct deliminators. The first time I saved the page, the equation would display perfectly. However, as soon as I edited the page the equation would disappear. (If you know TeX go ahead and try to put an equation here and see what happens). Since the whole point of a wiki is to be able to continuously edit the pages this did not seem acceptable to me. As I said, Mathjax help directed me to lfahlberg's page which is linked to above.

So this wiki currently has Mathjax in it's themes and appearences file as described by lfahlberg. When I want to display mathematics, I can open an "other widget" from the bar at the top of each page when editing and type LaTeX code directly into the widget. Here is an example of an inline text mathematical equation: media type="custom" key="11001586". I really appreciate the fact that I can get an inline equation that is well typeset. media type="custom" key="10976414" In addition I can use the other widget to make a displayed equation.media type="custom" key="10976420" So overall I'm quite pleased with how Mathjax displays the equations in these cases.

I initially found it confusing to figure out how to edit my mathematics once it disappeared into the large blue box of Other Widget. In case anyone else is wondering, you just click/select the other widget box and then a bar appears below the box which has the option to edit the widget. When you choose to edit the widget either the TeX code or the sentence with the TeX code appears and can be re-edited. You can also just double click on the other widget box and it will open. This solved my primary problem of wanting to have well displayed, reasonably easily edited mathematics in the wiki.

Feel free to edit this page to see how this works. When you do that you will also see the deliminators that Mathjax uses to let the webpage know that what comes next is mathematics and that the webpage needs to speak with the Mathjax servers in order to display it well. Please send me an email through the history page if something stops working on this page so that I can fix it.

Plusses

 * Mathematics is well displayed.
 * By clicking on the blue boxes, the mathematics is editable.
 * Mathjax knowledge is portable to other web interfaces (blogs, homepages, etc.)
 * Since the main text is done through wikispaces, the editing bar at the top of the page remains usable.

Negative

 * The big blue boxes mean that the view of the page in the editor is VERY different than the view of the page on the web.
 * Each time you want to edit the mathematics, you must open the blue box and close the blue box.
 * Although TeX is keyboard driven, we now need to open the other widget which is menu driven and not keyboard driven which slows down the typing process.