Nerdy Query: Does Anyone Know How To Write Equations in Kinja?

"Tim (Fractal Footwork)" (fractalfootwork)
12/08/2013 at 01:08 • Filed to: Nerdy Query, OppositeLock

More specifically superscripts and subscripts, and possibly also multitiered fractions and sums. I believe all of the signs and greek symbols are in ASCII, so that shouldn't be a problem to find, copy, and paste.

Otherwise, I think I might just have to take a picture or something.

Any help would be much obliged.

DISCUSSION (9)

orcim > Tim (Fractal Footwork)
12/08/2013 at 01:54

My Kinja editor has no capabilities for this from what I can see. I'd use something on the screen, and then post a screenshot. Maybe edit the pic down a bit to squeeze whitespace out for a closer fit.

Corpore Metal > Tim (Fractal Footwork)
12/08/2013 at 02:33

Sadly math support in HTML and CSS is very limited. There is a special markup for math equations called MathML but this is not widely supported either in browsers or WYSIWYG editors.

You can do work arounds with HTML 4 character entities, CSS rules and table markup but it's really kludgy. For example, there is support for Greek letters, both upper and lower case, like theta (θ), pi (π) or omega (ω). There is also support symbols like the radical sign
(√), the integration sign, (∫) and the summation sign (∑). But then you have to get into inline CSS rules and the _{and ^{tags to go superscript and subscript rolling to use the fraction slash mark (⁄) properly.}}

There are various editors that convert LaTeX to something compatible with HTML but these usually just convert the equations to images that are just inserted inline into text and markup. Which isn't very satisfactory especially if you're a blind person using a screen reader to read a webpage.

You may want to look at this page to see what can be done.

BJ > Tim (Fractal Footwork)
12/08/2013 at 07:51

If you're using the new editor, it has an "HTML" button that allows you to work manually with the markup, but you're still going to be limited to the basics:

Kinja'd!!!

You can always try inserting

tags and do your formatting the old-fashioned way, one space at a time:

1 2 1 - * - = - 2 3 3

djublonskopf > Corpore Metal
12/08/2013 at 11:29

Which always struck me as weird, because out of anybody, the set of people responsible for designing and implementing HTML should have been slanted towards "would personally use mathematical equation support in HTML".

story645 > Tim (Fractal Footwork)
12/08/2013 at 11:48

You could try mathjax , but I'm gonna agree with everyone else that my usual approach is to upload an image of the equation.

Lorem Ipsum > BJ
12/08/2013 at 12:04

Feeling nostalgia for the

tag.

#old school

Zeust the Mepsuan > Tim (Fractal Footwork)
12/08/2013 at 13:44

If you use the view where you edit the html sourcecode of your post, you can use MathML which is natively supported in html5. I don't know how easy it is to embed though, and I believe I once saw a MathML code sample and it looked very tedious to code (about 5-10x as much code as an equivalent LaTeX expression) but I'm not 100% sure that was MathML. Also it wouldn't surprise me if Kinja strips away any tags it doesn't know before storing your comment in their database, leaving nothing but mumble-jumble for whoever views your post.

Alternatively, there is a website which automatically generates an image of your equation when you present it with the LaTeX description (the link leads to a manual, not to the actual script, but it seems quite straightforward). The website supports svg so at least your equation will be rendered as vector graphics.

Source: first 4 DuckDuckGo search results for html5 equations

Corpore Metal > djublonskopf
12/08/2013 at 16:18

Back in the late Nineties and early Aughts, there was a lot of e-mail list discussion and VoIP conferences at the W3C about the shortcomings of HTML in displaying mathematical symbology. Many have noted the irony that HTML invented by an engineer with a physics degree, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, but utterly lacks a decent way to mark up math.

But instead, for many nutty reasons, scientists stuck with leaving math in LaTeX documents and PDFs.

The W3C is unavoidably slow moving, being an international and flexibly defined group of experts from industry, government, academia and advocacy groups, but, one can only hope this will finally be addressed in some way as the world standardizes on some future version of HTML or XHTML.

It takes time though. HTML 4 was clearly defined in the mid Nineties but was fully supported until about the mid Aughts (Thanks mostly to the Mozilla Project and the Web Standards Project .) and then there was the false start of XHTML 1 which, while more semantically clean and closely aligned with XML, was then abandoned for HTML 5, mostly because it had a better implementation of video embedding and because certain industry representitives pushed hard for it.

(As a web developer, specializing in accessible web design, I know more about this sausage-making horror of a process than I really want to.)

One can only hope that future forms of markup fix this oversight. Until then it's LaTeX, PDFs and image embedding.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > Tim (Fractal Footwork)
12/08/2013 at 16:47

Find a webpage that has the text symbol you want and just copy and paste it. This sigma () for example, I got from it's Wikipedia page.