All
activity on this site this week (apart from changing the theme) was done
behind the scenes. Finally, _neverendingbooks_ is upgraded to WordPress 2.0.
It is a straightforward well-explained procedure but somehow I decided
to try this out in between a WorkShop and a
Ph.D. defense. As a consequence I had to reclone twice…
Some of the Plugins‘ functionality
didn’t survive the upgrade. In particular, the anti-spam plugin BotCheck doesn’t work any longer (one could fill out any code and
still get a reply posted) as I found out sunday-morning when I was
greeted with about 20 spam-replies… Fortunately, WP 2.0 comes
bundled with its own anti-spam plugin Akismet but one needs a WordPress.com API key which
meens signing up to a WordPress-account (free). When Akismet is
activated, it really bans all spam (it even shows how many spam-messages
it found, 30 over two days…), the only problem being that it seems
to de-activate itself at random… The new theme is called Kiwi which is a lot more
compact than the default neverending(sic) page. But there is a (heavy
some will say) price to pay : only summaries of posts are on the
front-page and the font is (too some will say) small. Still, Kiwi has
some nice extra features : the Featured Post Plugin which
allows to re-cycle changing selected old posts to the right of the
banner. Another changing part is the _Elsewhere_ list (second row
to the right) where one can display any feed. At the moment (but I may
change this as the del.icio.us site
seems to be having some problems) all _del.icio.us_ links tagged
noncommutative are shown (if the site is up…). It
appears that apart from Graham
Leuschke nobody has a del.icio.us account or doesn’t use the
noncommutative tag. So, if you want to change this site a bit every day,
you know what to do. Speaking of tags, several new
_categories_ were created so that posts now get multiples tags,
describing better their (intended) content. Something I learned by
tagging papers at citeUlike. Btw.
you are still invited to join the
NoncommutativeGeometry Group over there… Clearly, re-tagging
every individual post was a painstaking experience. A WordPress 2.0
feature I like is the ability to write _pages_ (as opposed to
Posts) which are kept alive in the sidebar and therefore resemble
‘stickies’ (in WP parlace ‘they live outside of the usual
timeline’). At the moment there is just one test-page NAGworldMAP
on which you can see that geocoding was added to
this site via the Geo
Plugin (allowing to add geographic data to posts) and the instant google world map Plugin plotting these data on a Google Map. At the moment you can see
the distance I have to cycle to get to the university, but I have plans
to do something more substantial with this feature soon, so please
familiarize yourself with dragging and zooming the map (for US-citizens,
European countries often do not put geographic data in the public
domain, so there is a limit to the zoom-factor and I use the
‘satellite’-view rather than any of the other two).
Tag: wordpress
Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken, a wiser man once
said. Still, promises have a much longer life-span and sometimes their
real content becomes redundant over time.
A year ago, I
promised
to document how I got the
LaTeXRender Plugin for WordPress working under OS X. The procedure
consisted of some trial-and-error operations, installing non-standard
versions of software and hardcoding certain directories throughout
certain files…
Not something I was looking forward
to when I decided to upgrade this WordPress blog but,
surprisingly, things went pretty smoothly this time (Mac-technology
has improved a lot). So, please don’t worry too much about this
post and follow the (late) instructions below.
First
things first : I will assume you have the ‘generic’ LaTeX
running under Tiger (10.4),that is, use the i-Installer to download BOTH
LaTeX and Imagemagick! Further, in order to get WordPress up and
running, have the standard
MySQL 4.0 package installed for 10.3 (not version
4.1…) and don’t use the generic Mac-PHP version, but
instead download Marc
Liyanage’s PHP5 package which has plenty of additional
packages installed (notably, GDlib and MCRYPT which comes in handy if
you want to fight spam-comments using BotCheck).
\r
\n
Download wp-
latexrender.zip and follow the instructions given to the letter
(there is one undocumented extra directory you have to fill in at the
start of the latexrender-plugin.php file). There is
just one additional thing to do. Find in the
class.latexrender.php file the line starting
with
// convert dvi file to postscript using dvips
and include the following lines just before it
:
// begin of workaround // extending the PATH
environmental variable Soldpath =
getenv(“PATH”); Swhere_imagemagick_is =
“/usr/local/bin”; if (Soldpath) { Swhere_imagemagick_is .=
“:Soldpath”;} putenv(“PATH=Swhere_imagemagick_is”); //
end of workaround
activate the plugin and it
should work! Still, there are three things you may want to change. In
the latex.php file uncomment the indicated lines as
you will be using htmlArea to input your posts. In addition, if you
have the MarkDown-plugin enabled, it is best to append additional
lines such as
Slatex_formula = str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula); Slatex_formula = str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula);
(
between the first ” ” should be the beginning and end
em-tag respectively) or underscores will be interpreted as em-tags.
If you run into additional similar problems, the procedure is to
comment-out the line
unlink(Sthis->_tmp_dir.”/”.Sthis->_tmp_filename.”.tex”);
near the end of class.latexrender.php , look in the
tmp directory for the TeX-file, detect the problem and add similar
lines to the ones above to solve it. Another useful thing to do
is to add TeX-packages in the class.latexrender.php file. My own
version has the following predefined symbols and loaded
packages
function wrap_formula(Slatex_formula) {
Sstring =
“\\documentclass[“.Sthis->_font_size.”pt]{“.Sthis->_latexclass
.”}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\usepackage{amsmath}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\usepackage{amsfonts}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\usepackage{amssymb}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\usepackage{xy}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\xyoption{all}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\\\newcommand{\\vtx}[1]{*+[o][F-]{Scriptscriptstyle
#1}}\\n”; Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}c}{\\Bbbk}\\n”;
Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}}{\\mathbb{C}}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Q}}{\\mathbb{Q}}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Z}}{\\mathbb{Z}}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{N}}{\\mathbb{N}}\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\\\newcommand{\\mathbf}[1]{{\\\\text{\\em \\usefont{OT1}{cmtt}{m}{n}
#1}}}\\n”; Sstring .= “\\pagestyle{empty}\\n”; Sstring
.= “\\begin{document}\\n”; Sstring .=
“S”.Slatex_formula.”S\\n”; Sstring .=
“\\end{document}\\n”; return Sstring; }
which, among other things, allow all commenters to add
quiver-pictures using xymatrix and vtx to depict vertices. Oh yes, you
can allow comments to include LaTeX-code by uncommenting the
line
// add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘addlatex’);
in the latexrender-plugin.php
file (but before you do make sure you have spam under control, such as
with BotCheck mentioned above). That’s all for now. If you want
to use TeX in a comment, make sure to put the code between tags [ tex
] and [ /tex ] (omitting the extra spaces). If you want me to add
other LaTeX-packages, leave a comment.
Clearly,
an extended version of Markdown
including LaTeX-commands would be useful for mathematicians and surely
I’m not the first to think about this. In fact, I found a somewhat
pompous text New adventures
if hifi text by someone claiming to have done precisely that (though
he doesn’t give much details nor post a version of his altered program).
Still, it is pretty clear how to convert a _Markdown+LaTeX_
textfile to plain LaTeX (at least for regex-lovers
). Modify the _Markdown.pl_ script so that the Markdown markup is
translated not to HTML-tags but to LaTeX-commands.
More
interesting material can be found in a thread on _Markdown and
Mathematics_ starting with this post. In it, they search for a good way to include
LaTeX-mathematical commands in a MarkDown text. In fact, this is part of
a more general quest for a good _escape character_ in Markdown to
create _Markdown plus something_ versions. They opt for
{{ and }} rather than the usual
$ signs.
I think the alternatives [
tex ] and [ /tex ] are slightly better because
then you could feed the text to a functional WordPress installation with the
LaTeXRender plugin installed and copy the relevant part from the HTML-source of
the resulting post to get a HTML-version of the mathematical text with
all LaTeX-code converted to pictures. Clearly, typing the suggested tags
is somewhat cumbersome so I would type them using the
{{ and }} proposal (one
{ is not enough because a lot a LaTeX code uses single
curly brackets) and then do a global replace to get the
LaTeXRender-tags.
Even more interesting would be to have a
version of the html2txt.py script for LaTeX, that is,
converting a LaTeX-file to Markdown + LaTeXcode which would give an easy
way to convert your existing papers to HTML if you feed the LaTeXRender
plugin with all the required newcommands and packages.