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Writing maths for the web is easy now!

I’m still tired from the big MathsJam weekend so I thought I’d do something tedious and write up some links to go with the tedious talk about writing maths on the web that I gave.

The most important thing was MathJax, which renders LaTeX on any page. I forgot to mention in the talk that you don’t need to install anything on your browser or on your server – you can just paste the code they give you into your page’s header and it all works. I’ve previously blogged about a bookmarklet which will add MathJax to any page which doesn’t already have it.

LaTeX is quite hard to learn, particularly all the commands to get the symbols you want. Draw the symbol you want in Detexify and it will tell you the LaTeX command. Problem solved!

There’s also a new site called Shapecatcher, which does the same thing but for Unicode characters. I drew a snowman: !

Next I showed JSXGraph, which produces nice interactive geometry and graphs and which, again, runs in any browser and has some code you can paste in to load it without installing anything on your server.

Finally, I showed something I made, takenot.es, which rolls all of the above into a nice interface for quickly writing notes with maths in. I’ve been using it for all my maths-heavy blog posts since I made it and it really has saved a lot of time. Being able to instantly see how your LaTeX is rendered is very useful.