Support for mathematical equations in Socrata

I was thinking just displaying. For example, if I wanted to create a table of integrals, I might have a column with the integral, and another column with the solution. One of the entries might look something like this:



There are some pretty good free or open-source equation editors that aren't too difficult to build into web apps. Here's one: http://latex.codecogs.com/. That uses LaTeX, which is popular among mathematicians and engineers for typesetting math. Another option is to simply allow image uploads in table cells. Maybe you already allow this; I haven't tried. For the images to be most useful though, they need to have proper alt text, and the CodeCogs equation editor (and some others) does this automagically.

Great; thanks. I know it'll make a huge difference to the academic and scientific communities.

I've had some recent experience that may be of interest. The general category I believe is "blog-type markup", and it applies generally to applications ranging from blogs and socrata to wikipedia (and wikis generally). LaTeX currently has the unfortunate characteristic that it's typically not an embeddable markup - you need to do the entire document. But there's some signs of change.

There's a new markup technology that purports to support embeddable LaTeX, and has some other goodness characteristics, named reStructuredText that may be worth a look.

Hmmm... The interface seems to be working. The textarea did something funny with my href - try again -

There's a new markup technology that purports to support embeddable LaTeX, and has some other goodness characteristics, named reStructuredText

I'm not making a case specifically for LaTeX necessarily. I'd just like to see something that 1) would allow me to include mathematical formulas and 2) would allow the formulas to be reusable. Being "reusable" could mean one of several things. It could mean the formula is displayed as an image with usable (generally LaTeX) alt text. It could also mean the formula is displayed using a special markup language such as MathML.

There are blogs that use LaTeX markup, which displays the formulas as images with alt text. The Unapologetic Mathematician is one.

Some blogs use MathML. Musings is one.

I know of several forums using LaTeX. Math Help Forum is one.

Wikipedia uses texvc to display equations.Here's an example.

There are various free and open-source plug-ins available that enable this functionality. Perhaps one of these would be suitable with Socrata.