Colloquially Speaking

This is a test of WP LaTeX.

But this doesn’t work. I suspect that dvipng is not installed. I have tried deactivating Easy LaTeX as might be seen by the earlier post.

Now I am doing a little research for the server I use, SME Server and I found that it might be possible to install LaTex so that another plugin might be used, WP LaTex.  Here is the discussion at the SME Forum, Latex install (Sql-ledger).  I worry that the information may be a little dated or out of context and if I install it, I’ll have to test it.  Maybe the best way would be to use WordPress and that plugin.  We’ll see.

I’ve managed to download a Plugin for WordPress called Easy Latex and let’s see if I can make it work,

Yes, that seems to do it.

This plugin is easy, but the other plugins offered make me wonder what is going on.  Zhiqiang’s plugin, Latex for WordPress, mentions that you use an outside server on the basic edition of his plugin.  This suggests to me that maybe this plugin also uses an outside server to generate the image.  This is another clue into the Babylonian technocracy that is at the soul of LaTex.  It is a technology so completely bloated and disorganized that it is not even allowed to prounounce its name correctly.  The “x” is pronounced with a “ch” as in “loch” as in “Loch Ness” whereas your average idiot, like me, could only imagine that it is pronounced almost like “text” which it presumes to describe.

But anyway, I would rather use my own server as much as it is required.  This might also open the opportunity for publishing math outside of WordPress from my own server.  There also appear to be some restrictions that cover the whole WordPress installation so that one style setting for the plugin must be the same for every post.  So, Latex for WordPress might be the next plugin to try.

I used to have a site up called “Hacking into Reality”.  It was supposed to be a kind of report on some mathematics that were elementary up to the college level.  It discussed things like calculus and algebra at that level, but hoped to open up a view at the same time to mathematics at the frontiers which I presumed to have done some exploration.  However my efforts to publish mathematical thinking to the internet were confounded by the lack of a text editor that allowed the production and display of mathematical symbolism to the internet.  I summarized my efforts in this effort to a letter I sent to the W3C, the Worldwide Web Consortium entitled “My experiences with MathML“.

What is MathML?  MathML is a markup language based on XML, the Extensible Markup Language that is oriented around the logical basis of HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language.  The hopes of MathML are to bring to internet browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox the symbolism of mathematics.  It is a completely unrealized effort, there is no popular way for the average internet consumer to read MathML in their browsers.

But, I am wondering if this blogging software that I am using right now might be a way to publish mathematical symbolism to websites.  I recall that one of the ways that the technology was explored used an internet text editor very much like the one used to produce posts and pages to blogs like this and BBS’s as well.  There is at least one BBS I know of that uses precisely this kind of technology to discuss mathematics:  The SOS Mathematics Cyberboard

I intend to explore this potential for again bringing “Hacking into Reality” to a website of some kind.