in the elog

One feature that has been sorely missing in the elog has been the ability to easily add mathematical symbols. Here is an imperfect solution.

There is a browser plugin available for firefox, safari and chrome that allow you to add “markdown” formatting to any rich text input box in the browser. One feature of markdown is latex math formulae.

http://markdown-here.com/

The way it works is you type some latex formatted math text in between dollar signs, click the button in your browser, and it converts them to rendered images.

So this

$E=mc^2.$

becomes this

Some drawbacks:

The images are actually rendered through a google service, so if that service changes or goes down, the images won’t render, however the HTML source still contains the source string.
The size of formulae are not really matched to the text.
Going back and forth between rendered and unrendered can lose changes (if you make changes after rendering).

Bonus features:

It also works in Gmail!
You can do code highlighting:

#!/bin/bash   ### this is a comment  PATH=$PATH:/home/user/path    echo "How cool is this?"