TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

My first project in Rails – Pastebin for Mathematicians

136 pointsby huyover 11 years ago
Made this using Rails and Mathjax JS library. Sort of like the Gists for Latex. Would love to get any feedback.

24 comments

mathteacher1729over 11 years ago
I will be sharing this with my students.<p>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.<p>* 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.<p>* Rename Brackets &quot;Stretchy brackets&quot;? (Presently you have \left( x \right) which, to a new user is no different than simply writing (x).)<p>* Powers and Indices should mention that x_{...} is only required if more than one character is being used as a sub&#x2F;superscript.<p>* 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: <a href="http://www.sascha-frank.com/Faq/matrices.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sascha-frank.com&#x2F;Faq&#x2F;matrices.html</a><p>* The inclusion of an aligned equations template is wonderful.<p>* The table template would be better if it followed the style guides suggested here: <a href="http://tug.org/pracjourn/2007-1/mori/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tug.org&#x2F;pracjourn&#x2F;2007-1&#x2F;mori&#x2F;</a><p>* Double and triple integrals without bounds can be written as \iint and \iiint respectively. (no need for a series of \! between individual \int).<p>* It would be nice to toggle the collapse&#x2F;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.<p>* Throw \LaTeX\ in there somewhere. It&#x27;s not necessary, but would be nice to have.<p>Thank you for creating this, I am sure it will be very helpful for my students!
评论 #6329896 未加载
ushiover 11 years ago
Hmm, this doesn&#x27;t work in Chrome on your https page, because you load JavaScript (MathJax) with http and Chrome refuses to do that...
评论 #6328876 未加载
beberleiover 11 years ago
This is very cool! I could have really used this during my time at university. :)<p>How about as a next step adding revisions to formulas and making them commentable, working sort of like gists?
评论 #6329584 未加载
评论 #6328481 未加载
noodlyover 11 years ago
Theres already one: <a href="http://mathbin.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathbin.net</a> ... and you can also contribute: <a href="http://mathbin.net/contribute.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathbin.net&#x2F;contribute.html</a>
评论 #6329559 未加载
评论 #6328681 未加载
评论 #6328677 未加载
评论 #6328878 未加载
antoniover 11 years ago
As I believe you target this to mathematicians mainly, I would suggest putting some more sophisticated (a mathematics &quot;milestone&quot;) equation as an example, instead of simple quadratic equation.
评论 #6328963 未加载
mej10over 11 years ago
This is pretty cool! I think the usability is better than mathbin, and I like the list of easily findable&#x2F;clickable examples. Could even be useful for learning math formatting with LaTeX.
评论 #6329206 未加载
zer01over 11 years ago
Nice job! I like it, and this is a lot easier then sharing screenshots or raw TeX :-P.<p>Also make sure you sanitize user input, you have a XSS issue.<p><a href="https://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/bj1jknil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;texpaste.herokuapp.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;bj1jknil</a>
singoldover 11 years ago
This is really cool, I&#x27;ve learned a lot of latex in ~30 mins thanks to this.<p>I&#x27;m learning latex as part of a Numeric Methods course and will be sharing this with my fellow students<p>It would be great to have some feedback-app-thing integrated, I&#x27;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: <a href="https://www.uservoice.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uservoice.com&#x2F;</a> (I like it)
评论 #6331916 未加载
kctong529over 11 years ago
Great 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?
评论 #6330070 未加载
xyferover 11 years ago
This is pretty cool. I hate how we have a tough crowd here that&#x27;s not very encouraging. Keep hacking and having fun doing so!
评论 #6329341 未加载
nilliamsover 11 years ago
Nice project, is there a logical next step where the text outside the dollars can be formatted with markdown (or I suppose LaTeX)?
评论 #6328909 未加载
pseutover 11 years ago
I was going to be a smartass and put in unicode, but it worked. At least $∫$ did. So that was a very pleasant surprise.
bcuccioliover 11 years ago
This doesn&#x27;t load for me at the moment, so I can&#x27;t compare, but I also made something similar a few months ago in node.js: <a href="http://texbin.bcuccioli.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;texbin.bcuccioli.com</a>
garenpover 11 years ago
Very 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.
nimrodyover 11 years ago
An older alternative that does not rely on MathJax (produces png images) is QuickLatex:<p><a href="http://www.quicklatex.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quicklatex.com&#x2F;</a><p>It even supports latex packages (e.g. tikz).
delinkaover 11 years ago
One equals two - I stump high school teachers and college professors on this one:<p><a href="http://texpaste.herokuapp.com/n/c0iohnf5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;texpaste.herokuapp.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;c0iohnf5</a>
评论 #6331725 未加载
blitiover 11 years ago
Do you plan to open source the source code? I&#x27;d like to contribute with with the front end. It works very nicely, but looks too generic. (:
评论 #6329766 未加载
mrcactu5over 11 years ago
Currently I use MathOverflow&#x27;s `ask question` feature.<p>This is a great 1st rails project. Also there should be mathematician&#x27;s Twitter.
评论 #6331921 未加载
ydeftover 11 years ago
This is a very cool project. The design is clean, and the rendering is beautiful. Bookmarked.<p>Keep up the great work, OP!
jnevelsonover 11 years ago
The &#x27;How This Works&#x27; link is throwing a JS error in my Chrome console.
tghwover 11 years ago
TeX needs to be more widely taught. It saved my ass in grad school.
coherentponyover 11 years ago
The example doesn&#x27;t work. The maths isn&#x27;t rendered.
pmtarantinoover 11 years ago
Useful and simple. Congrats!
PuercoPopover 11 years ago
I can&#x27;t find a link to the source code
评论 #6329586 未加载