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My first project in Rails – Pastebin for Mathematicians
Made this using Rails and Mathjax JS library. Sort of like the Gists for Latex. Would love to get any feedback.
- beberlei 13y agoThis is very cool! I could have really used this during my time at university. :) How about as a next step adding revisions to formulas and making them commentable, working sort of like gists?
- adamcadaver 13y ago+1 Great Work OP!!!
- huy 13y agoThank you! Or you could share it with your university juniors ;) Those revisions and comments features are nice suggestions, though I really want to see exactly what features are needed for users to use this _regularly_.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoI'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but one of the first things that came to mind was to wish it would render an image that could be c'd and p'd.
- mdup 13y agoI thought that too, it would be very convenient. On the other hand don't drop the MathJax support because the rendering is really slick. Sometimes rendered images feel weird.
- huy 13y agoDo you mean exporting the entire text to image or just the equation parts?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoJust the equation parts, to be used in creating worksheets and quizzes.
- pmtarantino 13y agoUseful and simple. Congrats!
- ushi 13y agoHmm, this doesn't work in Chrome on your https page, because you load JavaScript (MathJax) with http and Chrome refuses to do that...
- huy 13y agoThanks for the report. Will be working on it!
- jawnb 13y agoOn the CDN urls, you can just change them to use protocol relative urls. It Looks like the jquerytools cdn doesn't support HTTPS, but you should be okay to use this one from cloudflare //cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery-tools/1.2.7/jquery.tools.min.js Here's a texpaste showing what you should change your script src's to. https://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/lyoitffa https://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/lyoitffa
- huy 13y agoThank you for going the extra mile. On a seperate note, I'm surprised that people actually try it on the https version (or be extra careful and manually add the https).
- tyilo 13y agoHTTPS Everywhre does it automatically for known sites that support https, eg. *.herokuapp.com
- lccarrasco 13y agoMany have plugins in their browsers that automatically try to get the https version of any website.
- SanderMak 13y agoNote that this won't work for MathJax, since the certificate won't match the domain. For a workaround: http://www.mathjax.org/resources/faqs/#problem-https http://www.mathjax.org/resources/faqs/#problem-https
- noodly 13y agoTheres already one: http://mathbin.net http://mathbin.net ... and you can also contribute: http://mathbin.net/contribute.html http://mathbin.net/contribute.html
- lysa 13y agoThere was already a search engine when Google started.
- noodly 13y agoThere still are search engines besides Google. ;)
- lysa 13y agoThere were already search engines before those search engines (that exist side by side with Google). Stop complaining about free "stuff"'s existence. What does the world owe to you?
- CalinBalauru 13y agoare there?
- CalinBalauru 13y agoare there? :)
- Sgflt 13y agoI prefer the usability of the OPs much better. The use of dollar signs might be a little clunkier than the begin/end tags when you want to use a dollar sign. But all in all I think the presentation is better and a bit more welcoming.
- noodly 13y agoYes it is, and I hope he can contribute to mathbin as it is more widely used - at least it's official pastebin in ##math channel on freenode. I don't know if the author of mathbin is still working on it (the message on main page is old), but I think it's worth a shot ;)
- jnevelson 13y agoThe 'How This Works' link is throwing a JS error in my Chrome console.
- nilliams 13y agoNice project, is there a logical next step where the text outside the dollars can be formatted with markdown (or I suppose LaTeX)?
- huy 13y agoThat would be nice suggestion. Though I'm trying to see what would people use this for before adding any extra feature. I envision it would be used in university for students to share math notes/proofs. We'll see.
- nilliams 13y agoGreat, good luck!
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoI'll show it to my JuCo students, maybe it will improve their papers.
- antoni 13y agoAs I believe you target this to mathematicians mainly, I would suggest putting some more sophisticated (a mathematics "milestone") equation as an example, instead of simple quadratic equation.
- huy 13y agoThank you, really good feedback.
- garenp 13y agoVery nice. I always wished there was a nice way to write natural looking math via IRC--that was still readable in text form--with some kind of whiteboard looking interface for DCC chats that looked pretty.
- mej10 13y agoThis is pretty cool! I think the usability is better than mathbin, and I like the list of easily findable/clickable examples. Could even be useful for learning math formatting with LaTeX.
- huy 13y agoThat's what I have in mind too. This would be so much easier for Latex beginners to pick up latex!
- kctong529 13y agoGreat work! This will make more people start to see the beauty of LaTeX. As I suppose the target users of this project are those who like WYSIWYG approach, they may not want to replace the default element in the text field one by one. Is it possible to prompt the user in request for values before passing it to the textfield? Or let the user create their own default values after logged in?
- huy 13y agoThat would be slightly complicated, but maybe the alternative is if you select an expression and click on some 1-variable function then we'll use the expression instead of the generic 'x'.
- xyfer 13y agoThis is pretty cool. I hate how we have a tough crowd here that's not very encouraging. Keep hacking and having fun doing so!
- huy 13y agoActually the crowd has been pretty encouraging and supportive. I'm really surprised and didn't expect the response to be this positive.
- PuercoPop 13y agoI can't find a link to the source code
- kintamanimatt 13y agoMaybe it's not open source.
- mrcactu5 13y agoCurrently I use MathOverflow's `ask question` feature. This is a great 1st rails project. Also there should be mathematician's Twitter.
- huy 13y agoLove the idea of Twitter for Mathematicians.
- bliti 13y agoDo you plan to open source the source code? I'd like to contribute with with the front end. It works very nicely, but looks too generic. (:
- huy 13y agoHaven't really thought about it, but yeah why not! I'd love some help, especially with the front end. Edit: Sorry I close it down. Realized that there's some bit of JS code that's contributed by a friend, so I need to check and ask for his permission first. I'll contact you personally to seek for your help :) Thank you again!
- bliti 13y agoIts all right. If you do get the green light, email me. I'm looking for open source projects to contribute.
- bcuccioli 13y agoThis doesn't load for me at the moment, so I can't compare, but I also made something similar a few months ago in node.js: http://texbin.bcuccioli.com http://texbin.bcuccioli.com
- mathteacher1729 13y agoI will be sharing this with my students. A few comments are below. My motivation behind the comments is based on how students who are new to LaTeX tend to misuse or not fully recognize the full power of LaTeX. I realize that this may not be the target audience of your project and so if any of my comments are not appropriate, please disregard them. * Mention that \( .. \) is the same as $...$ and \[ ... \] is the same as $$...$$ and that each will slightly alter the appearance of limits, integrals, and sums. TO put it another way, make clear the difference between display math vs. inline math. * Rename Brackets "Stretchy brackets"? (Presently you have \left( x \right) which, to a new user is no different than simply writing (x).) * Powers and Indices should mention that x_{...} is only required if more than one character is being used as a sub/superscript. * Under matrices, there is no need for the left and right delimters. There are three commonly used environments: bmatrix, pmatrix, and vmatrix for matrices enclosed by brackets, parenthesis and vertical bars. More types are listed here: http://www.sascha-frank.com/Faq/matrices.html http://www.sascha-frank.com/Faq/matrices.html * The inclusion of an aligned equations template is wonderful. * The table template would be better if it followed the style guides suggested here: http://tug.org/pracjourn/2007-1/mori/ http://tug.org/pracjourn/2007-1/mori/ * Double and triple integrals without bounds can be written as \iint and \iiint respectively. (no need for a series of \! between individual \int). * It would be nice to toggle the collapse/expansion of a menu by clicking it. Presently clicking it allows me to expand and the only way to collapse is to click on another. * Throw \LaTeX\ in there somewhere. It's not necessary, but would be nice to have. Thank you for creating this, I am sure it will be very helpful for my students!
- huy 13y agoThank you for the thoughtful answer. I'm really happy that you find it useful. I have noted your feedback and will work through it. > students who are new to LaTeX tend to misuse or not fully recognize the full power of LaTeX. I realize that this may not be the target audience of your project and so if any of my comments are not appropriate, please disregard them. These are actually the perfect audience for the project. You see, the main thing that this tool offers is _convenience_, which is much appreciated by the LaTeX beginners thanks to its steep learning curve and complicated software setups. So please do share it with your students, I hope this helps them one way or another :) By the way, I've got a proper domain for it: www.texpaste.com
- coherentpony 13y agoThe example doesn't work. The maths isn't rendered.
- zer01 13y agoNice job! I like it, and this is a lot easier then sharing screenshots or raw TeX :-P. Also make sure you sanitize user input, you have a XSS issue. https://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/bj1jknil https://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/bj1jknil
- pseut 13y agoI was going to be a smartass and put in unicode, but it worked. At least $∫$ did. So that was a very pleasant surprise.
- delinka 13y agoOne equals two - I stump high school teachers and college professors on this one: http://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/c0iohnf5 http://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/c0iohnf5
- tghw 13y agoException: Division by zero
- ydeft 13y agoThis is a very cool project. The design is clean, and the rendering is beautiful. Bookmarked. Keep up the great work, OP!
- tghw 13y agoTeX needs to be more widely taught. It saved my ass in grad school.
- singold 13y agoThis is really cool, I've learned a lot of latex in ~30 mins thanks to this. I'm learning latex as part of a Numeric Methods course and will be sharing this with my fellow students It would be great to have some feedback-app-thing integrated, I'll love to report issues, but I think that if it is in page would be better than going to some mail client or something. Maybe this could help: https://www.uservoice.com/ https://www.uservoice.com/ (I like it)
- huy 13y agoWas thinking about the feedback thing this morning actually - and I think that would be the very first feature to add (after work)
- nimrody 13y agoAn older alternative that does not rely on MathJax (produces png images) is QuickLatex: http://www.quicklatex.com/ http://www.quicklatex.com/ It even supports latex packages (e.g. tikz).