Not to me it's not.

Hi,

Care to elaborate?

Sure it's pro's and con's of course, but if you are pro then you want to use it, and if not you might not want to use it, or you might want to use both Latex and plain text, or maybe even a picture file.

 

All you youngsters miss the point entirely.

I think I understand the point you are trying to make. Basically, why isn't there a nice, easy, intuitive interface on the forum for creating mathematical equations in a WYSIWYG fashion. Perhaps something where you have a palette of options that you drag and drop into the edit pane. Right?

Given the klunky way that symbols are inserted (for me, whenever I insert a symbol from the list it appears as the very first character in the post and not at the current cursor location, which I find very annoying), I don't hold out a lot of hope for a nice graphical interface that is going to work cleanly on all the various platforms that people use.

Also, given how slow and unresponsive the editor often becomes when just trying to type simple text, I don't want to even think of how much worse it would be with a WYSIWYG equation editor.

There's also the reality that most people will be limited to the simple capabilities of the GUI and the expressive power of what it would support would probably be a small subset of what you can achieve coding it directly. Basically you are limiting yourself to what someone else imagined. Now, the counter argument is that without a GUI a lot of people are even further limited because they won't make the time or effort to even learn how to write the LaTeX code for simple stuff.

There certainly are WSIWIG LaTeX editors out there and I don't imagine it would be impossible to find a plugin that is compatible with the XenFro forum software. If it were an option that could be used or not used and didn't harm performance when not being used, I'd support adding it, provided it produced code that you could tweak manually.

 

I think I understand the point you are trying to make. Basically, why isn't there a nice, easy, intuitive interface on the forum for creating mathematical equations in a WYSIWYG fashion. Perhaps something where you have a palette of options that you drag and drop into the edit pane. Right?

Actually no I don't mean that at all, but thank you for the thought.

In fact this forum used to sport the best scientific interface around when it was with Vbulletin.

Dave (I think) had done an absoulutely marvellous job and I have held it up as an example to be copied (and it was) to other scientific forums.
The only thing missing was a direct superscript and subscript that some other forums use.

I was not blaming the forum, I was blaming computer manufacturers - so called engineers - for the lack of a modern interface and bemoaning the fact that the creators of this technology have saddled themselves with almost the most clumsy and cumbersome 19th century interface imaginable.

This is supposted to be the second half of the second decade of the 21st century.

 

Okay, so is what you are talking about is that we should have a hardware interface, instead of keyboard/mouse, suitable for doing scientific "things" directly? If so, I think that exists. I've seen demos of touch screen machines where you use a stylus (which themselves have gone out of vogue in favor of finger swipes) to write an equation on the screen and it interprets it and translates it into an equation presented by the rendering engine. At least some of those translate it into a format that math software packages can interpret. So I would be a bit surprised if there weren't packages that would translate it into LaTeX code.

But I don't see anything like that becoming standard fare on consumer computers because the fraction of people that want that is a miniscule fraction of the market.

 

The capability of modern technology is way beyond that.
Even my old Commodore PET could do better than that.
All it takes it a bit of imagination

 

The capability of modern technology is way beyond that.
Even my old Commodore PET could do better than that.
All it takes it a bit of imagination

I'm not too familiar with the Commodore PET. What was it that it could do that was way beyond recognizing equations entered freehand on a touch screen? What was the hardware interface like that supported these capabilities?

 

The PET, like most personal computers of that age used block graphics and fixed alternate 'character' sets that included many useful symbols, all available at the touch of a button.

It would not be beyond the wit of Man to make a keyboard where each key could change the symbol displayed on it, and produce that symbol or command in the machine.

So I could have a 'maths' keyboard and simply press a key or two to get an integral sign or whatever.

Touch screen tablets are almost there now.

 

I find the Latex engine very clunky but I endure the pain for the sake of clarity. It is extremely laborious using a "smart" phone. I test my input script using the "More Options..." button to get to the preview option and then post when I'm satisfied with what I see displayed.

 

Hello again,

Has there been a suggestion for a dedicated keyboard to do the math symbols?
That's an interesting idea, but not sure how it would be implemented.
I suppose you mean a *virtual* keyboard. A true physical hardware keyboard would be costly to make.
There are programs out there that do virtual keyboards, but just the regular type with 101 keys or whatever. But i thought the Latex editors sort of function like a virtual keyboard because at least some of them let you choose the symbols rather than have to type the codes in.
I'll have to take a look some again. Is there one on this site?

 

Hello again,

Has there been a suggestion for a dedicated keyboard to do the math symbols?
That's an interesting idea, but not sure how it would be implemented.
I suppose you mean a *virtual* keyboard. A true physical hardware keyboard would be costly to make.
There are programs out there that do virtual keyboards, but just the regular type with 101 keys or whatever. But i thought the Latex editors sort of function like a virtual keyboard because at least some of them let you choose the symbols rather than have to type the codes in.
I'll have to take a look some again. Is there one on this site?

Gosh someone finally read one of my posts.

Thank you Mr Al.

 

Gosh someone finally read one of my posts.

Thank you Mr Al.

Hi again,

I didnt think too many people would miss any of your posts.

You got me thinking...i've developed a few different virtual keyboards for Windows in the past, all of which can do the regular keys like a,b,c, etc., but one also does unusual things like double parens:
()
so you dont have to type both of them before you enter something in between, and one that does various little symbols like pi and even "*" where you dont have to shift, and even left and right parens so you dont have to shift. So i would think it would be a hop, skip, and a jump to make a Latex keyboard. I guess it would have to type out things like:
'backslash' "("
or whatever the Latex requirement was for a left paren (i'd have to look this up).
That would mean a key for the integration, key for fractions, etc.

Think it would be doable? If so i could probably get one up and running in a day or two, just to try a few Latex functions. I'd have to look a lot of stuff up i guess.