I’ve added a lot more user-friendly features to my write maths, see maths tool over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve moved it to its own domain.

The tool is now available at http://takenot.es, which I think we can all agree is a terrifically clever domain name.

Since I last wrote about it, I’ve added the ability to save and retrieve pages, and support for automatically embedding things like pictures and videos using oEmbed

There’s also a print stylesheet, so if you print a page of notes it will look clean and tidy.

Finally, as well as HTML output you can now also get a proper LaTeX document of your notes by clicking on the “TeX please” button.

I’ve been using it to write up real notes for my research, and I’m very pleased with how quickly I can get stuff written down. I have something like TeX-anxiety for writing up maths, mainly because the process of writing a LaTeX document is such a hassle. With this tool, I can see what I’m doing as I type it, and there’s much less pressure to worry about things looking proper while I’m just transcribing thoughts.

Please have a go at using it and tell me what you think. Any suggestions for other aspects of mathematography that could be made easier with some Internet magic are also welcome.

I’ve put the source to my write maths, see maths editor on github. The latest version should always be available there.

In other news, I’ve added support for geometric diagrams using JSXGraph. It’s good for very simple diagrams, but I don’t think you can do anything hugely complicated with it.

I’ve written a bit of javascript that uses jQuery and MathJax to make a sort-of-WYSIWYG maths editor.

Because MathJax can typeset LaTeX pretty much instantly, it’s a lot quicker to work with than the usual LaTeX write–compile–look loop.

I’m thinking about using this for videos of problem solutions. Because it’s LaTeX it’s a lot neater than my handwriting, and I don’t have to faff around with cameras.

The problem in this video is from an old P6 Further Maths A Level paper. I picked a question that wouldn’t require too much typing, but had some meat to it. If I did this properly I’d talk over it, but at the moment I’m a bit tired and the family upstairs are being quite noisy.

You can have a go on the editor here but beware that I’ve only tested it on Google Chrome. What you type gets saved to your browser’s local storage, so it should persist between browser sessions.

What do you think about it? Is it helpful? Would you consider using something like it?

I've started a collection of interesting non-pregroup-related papers on Mendeley. At the moment this includes a formal system which makes the diagrams in Euclid's proofs a part of the formal reasoning, and "How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children"