easily displaying math online
- From: pbbl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Graven Water)
- Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:17:09 -0400 (EDT)
I'm trying to think how one could easily display math on internet
forums and on webpages. The "pidgin latex" people use is very hard to
read, and a lot of work to type in.
You can write something in Latex and convert it into an image file,
but this is also a lot of work.
The nicest thing would be just to write up formulas with a lot of
symbols by hand, like you were writing them on paper, and have them
go into an image file (.gif format is best), and be able to type in
the text parts on a keyboard into an image file.
Then you would post the image file on a forum, or put it on a webpage
and put a link to the image into the forum post.
I'm not sure what's the best way to do that, but my best guess so far
is to get a graphics tablet. So what you would do is, say, open
Windows Paint, and you would write formulas with the tablet pen into
Paint, and enter the text parts of the math into text boxes in Paint.
It might be very easy and quick. You'd have to have an operating
system that supports tablets, like Windows Vista does, except for
Vista Home Basic. Or, there is something called an Adesso Cybertablet
which is described as a tablet PC, and comes with Windows Vista, and
doesn't cost very much (like $150 or so). A lot of tablet PC's are
very expensive, like $1500, but they may have features you don't need
for this application.
Features that seem important with this:
- being able to edit the document, cut and move pieces around. You
can do this in Windows Paint.
- being able to output an image in .gif format. Paint can save files
in .gif (it's more suitable than jpeg for this purpose).
- Sometimes graphics tablets come bundled with software which you
probably don't need for this. Like Adobe Photoshop.
- Possibly, an erase end on the tablet pen, although Paint has an
erase mode and you could probably switch your pen to this (?)
You *probably* don't want a "digital notebook" or a "digital pen" for
this, they seem like they might not have the flexibility to, say, cut
a piece around one part of a document and move it to elsewhere.
One might just get a scanner, write everything down on a piece of
paper, then compress the file/edit it in Paint. This would not work
well for things you want to edit a lot, when you came up with a final
version of your work you'd have to write it by hand on a piece of
paper to be scanned in. But a scanner is otherwise useful, you could
scan in pages of books that you want to save on your computer, for
example.
Surely other people have thought about this, and if you have and you
have thoughts about what's worked well, please tell me. It's kind of
the wave of the future, you can imagine students in the future won't
have to copy lecture notes by hand from the blackboard, for example.
Laura
.
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