Testing latex

No, not the rubber stuff; the math stuff. According to the WP codex, it should be as simple as this:

$latex i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left|\Psi(t)\right>=H\left|\Psi(t)\right>$

OK, so that doesn't work :\. Ah right, that's just for when you have the blog under the wordpress.org itself. Right … mimetex then.

* finds wp-latexrender.zip here.

* looks for install procedure.

* looks for clear install procedure.

* tries the install anyway.

* reads the mimetex.php in full because while everyone says to update the path directories, it's unclear what to set them to especially as they seem to be double.

* sighs and rewrites the whole function because the variables and how they are used are … silly.

Right. How about this then: "$$x^2+y^2$$"?

$x^2+y^2$

Yaaay! :D. And now for some more interesting forms:

$E = mc^2 \label{clever}$

OK, so apparently I can't put the labels into mimetex. Let's see what else will and will not work ...

$\lim_{n \to \infty}\sum_{k=1}^n \frac{1}{k^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}$

Okay ... so the default version doesn't like newlines either. So let's tweak the formula so that all whitespace (and repeated white) it replaced by a single space ... '/\s+/ /g' should do the trick.

$\LARGE\tilde y=\left\{ {\ddot x\text{ if \vec x odd}\atop\hat{\,\bar x+1}\text{ if even}}\right.$
$\small\hspace{10}\unitlength{.75} \picture(120,220){~(60,200){\circle(120,40)}~(0,20){\line(0,180)} (5,189;0,-30){\pict(110,20){(c20,10;70;2){ \pict(40,20){(20,10){\circle(40,20)}(c10,10)+(c30,10)-}}~}~} (119,20){\line(0,180)}~(60,20){\circle(120,40;34)}}$
$\bold C( \theta, \phi) = \bold R_y(\phi) \cdot \bold R_x(\theta) = \begin{bmatrix} \cos (\phi) & \sin(\phi) \sin(\theta) & -\sin(\phi) \cos(\theta)\\ 0 & \cos(\theta) & \sin(\theta) \\ \sin(\phi) & -\cos(\phi)\sin(\theta) & \cos(\phi)\sin(\theta) \end{bmatrix}$

And to try some inline stuff: $m \vec{a} = -k \vec{x}$ . Or maybe $\fs2 m \vec{a} = -k \vec{x}$ for something a little smaller. Yay, that works as well.

Anyway, for anyone who also wants math on their site, you can get mimetex from from http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html. Although the site starts with the source, there are precompiled binaries in the back somewhere. I would recommend rewriting mimetex.php, though: I found it somewhat tricky to get it working. It relies on 4 paths, but it doesn't exactly say what they were supposed to represent or what they should be set to; when I tried it locally the only way to get them to work was to do stuff that had little relation to the fill-in-the-blanks parts of the paths.

It doesn't like whitespace either in or around the formula, so removing that can be useful; so is feeding the through rawurlencode() if you want to put it into the url: HTMLTidy really doesn't like all the backslashes and stuff in the url. Adding options to the [tex] tag is also a good idea (like size; see above). And what's especially useful is a preview mode that doesn't render to a file. That way you won't be left with hundreds of little temporary bitmaps for all the failed variants. (I suppose I could give you mine, but it's not finished yet.)

Lastly, if you're new to TeX, consider using this site as an editor. There is a larger manual on the mimetex maintainer's site, but this little tool is very useful.