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MosTeX

2005-05-08 1 min read Joomla marco

Who would have thought math would came back to haunt me in the most delectable way??? I found a mosbot (mostex) that renders TeX formulas in the simplest of ways. You just add the mostag “tex” in your content, and you get a formula that ‘looks’ right.

Say you want to have ‘x square plus y square’ in your content. You enter { tex } x^2 + y^2 { /tex } and that renders as {tex} x^2 + y^2 {/tex}. That’s much prettier, of course.

Of course, if this is the best it can do, it’s not really useful. But for something really complicated like:

{tex}\Large A\ =\ \large\left( \begin{array}{c.ccc}&1&2&3\\\hdash1&a_{11}&a_{12}&a_{13}\\ 2&a_{21}&a_{22}&a_{23}\\3&a_{31}&a_{32}&a_{33}\end{array}\right){/tex}

That’s much better and makes a lot of sense. You can do crazy stuff like images:

{tex}\Large\hspace{5}\unitlength{1} \picture(175,100){~(50,50){\circle(100)} (1,50){\overbrace{\line(46)}^{4$\;\;a}} (52,50){\line(125)}~(50,52;115;2){\mid}~(52,55){\longleftar[60]} (130,56){\longrightar[35]}~(116,58){r}~(c85,50;80;2){\bullet} (c85,36){3$-q}~(c165,36){3$q} (42,30){\underbrace{\line(32)}_{1$a^2/r\;\;\;}}~} {/tex}

Of course, you have to watch out when you enter text like the descriptions of the images above in any HTML text area editor. I am using HTMLArea3, and there was no way to convince it to play along, aside from turning off HTML mode.