Show HN: Markdown + LaTeX math in the browser(socrates.io)

121 pointsby pkrein13 anni fa32 comments

Show HN: Markdown + LaTeX math in the browser

http://socrates.io/#

19 comments

People in this thread may also find GmailTex useful. It's a browser plugin which enables using LaTeX syntax in Gmail and GChat.

http://alexeev.org/gmailtex.html

P.S.: This Socrates thing is pretty fantastic. Is there a keyboard shortcut for switching to the compiled view?

csense13 anni fa

I tested it on Chromium (the FOSS version of Google Chrome), and in that browser, the math uses a much smaller font than the Firefox version. (Firefox looks "right.")

I'm using Linux Mint 14 (the most recent version), the default version of Chromium from the distribution's repo; all packages are up-to-date, and I don't have any browser extensions or any intense customization.

indubitably13 anni fa

The Firefox version appears broken to me?

http://i.imgur.com/9eeSvlU.png

Firefox 19/OSX Lion

Benferhat13 anni fa

Same here with Chromium (23.0.1271.97-0ubuntu0.12.04.1)

warmfuzzykitten13 anni fa

Looks fine in Chrome / Mac OS X.

chjj13 anni fa

I recommend upgrading to the latest release of marked ( https://github.com/chjj/marked/tree/v0.2.8 ). It has a few improvements as well as GFM tables.

ianstormtaylor13 anni fa

Beautiful! You wouldn't happen to know if it supports "smart" quotes would you? Been meaning to find one that does support those.

Also auto-id-ing heading elements so they can be hash-linked to? That's another of my marked requests.

chjj13 anni fa

> Beautiful! You wouldn't happen to know if it supports "smart" quotes would you?

Marked has a pretty big todo list right now. Those are on it somewhere.

> Also auto-id-ing heading elements so they can be hash-linked to?

This is actually requested less than I expected it to be, but I think I do want to add something for it in the future.

ianstormtaylor13 anni fa

Oh nice, didn't make the connection that you were the maintainer ;)

Yeah id-ing of heading elements is something I really wish we had for our docs (https://segment.io/docs) because we have to break out of markdown for every header to make them linkable.

I just wish I knew enough to be able to contribute. That was my problem with Stylus too...

cpursley13 anni fa

This is cool. I wanted to do a blog post on some real estate appraisal topics, which requires math examples. Is this open source? Where I can I find socrates.io - it goes straight to the interface.

ianstormtaylor13 anni fa

Yup it is! On Github: https://github.com/segmentio/socrates

imslavko13 anni fa

That's cool. I was using markable.in in last weeks. But lack of code highlighting and Mathjax brings socrates.io on the first place :)

justinvh13 anni fa

I wrote a LaTeX Markdown plugin as well, but it served a different purpose. It was geared for offline documents.

https://github.com/justinvh/Markdown-LaTeX

It generates inline/base64-encoded images with a small file-cache for the generated images. Try it out!

nimrody13 anni fa

There used to be a similar service at http://notepag.es/ However, it seems to be down now.

amckinlay13 anni fa

Really wish they used Pandoc Markdown or some other form of extended Markdown... then I could consider using it for real stuff,

pixie_13 anni fa

Why not use jqMath? It's latex based, 10 times smaller, and 10 times faster than MathJax - which is aimed more at publishers.

jey13 anni fa

Interesting. Looks like it maps TeX directly to HTML, so it must support fewer constructs? Or what are the downsides? Being 10x faster and 10x smaller without any drawbacks seems too good to be true.

jessriedel13 anni fa

"TeX-based" is the operative term here. The syntax is somewhat different true TeX (so it would drive people who use TeX regularly crazy, like me). And I don't believe it has the same abilities.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m13 anni fa

jqMath doesn’t use LaTeX.

quaz3l13 anni fa

I've been working on something just like this! It is a mashup of Ghost<john.onolan.org/ghost/>, and a editor like this. If you was to see the uncompleted version its here: http://quaz3l.github.com/ghost/g-admin/posts.html

somethingnew13 anni fa

If you think this is cool, check out http://spandex.io/

kanatzidis13 anni fa

Oh man, this is really cool. Great job. I'm the co-founder of http://SpanDeX.io (which I see someone already commented about) and we love seeing this kind of stuff. Great to see LaTeX getting implemented in a really useful way!

swah13 anni fa

In the end, how should I use this product? Writing Latex before compiling the final thing on your PC?

hyperbovine13 anni fa

I wish it had better support for live editing, but this is really a limitation of MathJax / TeX in general. Still, I wonder if it might be possible to improve the experience a bit by e.g. only updating when I close a $$ block, etc.

mcmire13 anni fa

That's what I was going to say. I found the constant reformatting of the math stuff in the right pane extremely jarring.

Otherwise, nice and simple.

pkrein13 anni fa

yeah -- we'll try to smooth this out!

warmfuzzykitten13 anni fa

Does this mean you can only see the math in Socrates? How do you publish a page on the web outside Socrates?

hnwh13 anni fa

this looks nice, but i'm confused.. how do i actually use it on my webpage?

gmt202713 anni fa

It's a shame that there doesn't seem to be any export option.

ianstormtaylor13 anni fa

That's something we've gotten a lot of requests for and want to build one of these weekends :)