Web Forums with Wierd Notation

August 24, 2005 10:03 AM

Are there any web discussion forums that allow embedding of weird notations (like complex math or music scores)?

A long time ago I saw some forum that had LaTeX-like capabilities in it. Do such things still exist? What about for non-math uses?

posted by sandking to computers & internet (2 comments total)

The MathML page at w3c has information about apps that are using this (which is probably the "LaTex-like" system you encountered). PHPWiki has a MathML plugin which I've had (limited) success with. The IE plugin works surprisingly well; the Mozilla family is supposed to understand MathML natively but I have never ever gotten the font issues resolved on Macs, and I would be interested hearing from anyone who has.
posted by Wolfdog at 10:25 AM on August 24, 2005

I really don't know much about this topic at all, and this is maybe not what you're looking for, but commenters on Jacques Distler's blog can embed itex equations, which the blog will convert to MathML. If the forum software that you end up using is implemented with Perl, then you could possibly adapt his Itex2MML plugin to your purposes.

If you choose to output MathML, I imagine that your greatest difficulty won't be with the MathML per se, but with ensuring that all of your user input always ends up as valid, well-formed XML.
posted by cobra libre at 11:18 AM on August 24, 2005