Widgets+and+Mathjax



Mathjax is a java applet that helps to display mathematics on the web by live translating LaTeX that it finds on the website. If you click on their logo above, you will go to their [|main webpage]. They have very good instructions for using Mathjax in a variety of contexts on the web. When I was having trouble making Mathjax work effectively in wikispaces, I found their help team to be prompt, thoughtful, and accurate. They answered numerous questions, and eventually directed me to this wiki entry by lfahlberg with a good explanation of what to do in the background of the wiki theme and appearence.

When I initially followed the Mathjax instructions as found on their webpage, I could enter equations into my text using LaTeX with the correct deliminators. The first time I saved the page, the equation would display perfectly. However, as soon as I edited the page the equation would disappear. (If you know TeX go ahead and try to put an equation here and see what happens). Since the whole point of a wiki is to be able to continuously edit the pages this was unacceptable. As I said, Mathjax help directed me to lfahlberg's page which is linked above.

So this wiki currently has Mathjax in it's themes and appearences file as described by lfahlberg. When I want to display mathematics, I can open an "other widget" from the bar at the top of each page when editing and type LaTeX code directly into the widget with the appropriate deliminators for mathjax. Here is an example of an inline text mathematical equation: media type="custom" key="11000282". I really appreciate the fact that I can get an inline equation that is well typeset.media type="custom" key="11008378" In addition I can use the other widget to make a displayed equation.media type="custom" key="10998896" So overall I'm quite pleased with how Mathjax displays the equations in these cases.

I initially found it confusing to figure out how to edit my mathematics once it disappeared into the large blue box of Other Widget. In case anyone else is wondering, you just click/select the other widget box and then a bar appears below the box which has the option to edit the widget OR you can double click the other widget box. When you choose to edit the widget either the TeX code or the sentence with the TeX code appears and can be re-edited. This solved my primary problem of wanting to have well displayed, reasonably easily edited mathematics in the wiki.

Plusses

 * Mathematics is well displayed.
 * By clicking on the blue boxes, the mathematics is editable
 * Mathjax can be used in other platforms such as a webpage or a blog so it is more transferable.
 * You always have access to all of the wikispaces editing features at the top of the page.

Negative

 * The big blue boxes mean that the view of the page in the editor is VERY different than the view of the page on the web.
 * Each time you want to edit the mathematics, you must open the blue box and close the blue box.
 * Although TeX is keyboard driven, the other widget boxes are menu driven and this slows down your typing.

If you reached this page through some labrynth of clicks and you want to try to explore this technology. There is an equivalent page at mathexperiment.wikispaces.com which is editable by anyone who can find the page. This page is only editable by my students.