How are mathematical papers written?

[Rufus_Xavier]

Preview? Pshaw! Who on God’s green earth could be posting the exact same thing I am posting at the exact same moment?

[BrotherCadfael]

@Rufus Xavier

Preview? Pshaw! Who on God’s green earth could be posting the exact same thing I am posting at the exact same moment?

Well, technically, just a moment BEFORE…

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@MikeS

True. But the OP was asking what mathematicians use in their journal papers, and I’d wager that the vast, vast, vast majority of them prefer AMS-LaTeX to Mathematica for that purpose.

Apparently, you can export TeX-formatted eqations from Mathematica. I guess it won’t do the whole document, though. I’ve never tried it, but now I’ll have to check it out. You know, just in case I get the urge to submit a few things to professional math journals in my spare time. :dubious:

Stranger

[KellyM]

WikiMedia, the software that underlies Wikipedia, support inlining TeX for the purpose of displaying math. This is used to considerable effect in the mathematics portions of the English Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/.

TeX is an excellent product that requires some degree of programming knowledge to really use well. I used to type papers for people in TeX. The results are far superior to what you’d get out of Word; TeX has enough sense not to hyphenate two lines in a row (unless it REALLY has to), for example. TeX also has a mechanism by which you can “tighten” or “loosen” a paragraph’s spacing constraints so as to make it one line shorter or longer without changing margins or anything else.

[Shalmanese]

My guess is the admins are not going to like a new feature that is going to add yet more server load to our currently overworked hamsters.

[Kimstu]

Just FYI, I asked a mathematical typesetting expert I know for an opinion about the feasibility of integrating math markup into this board’s vB code. He opined as follows:

@Mathematical Typesetting Expert

I looked into vBulletin (the bulletin board software that they are
using), and it does look like it would not be too hard to hook jsMath
into it. There is a BB Code editor in the administrator tools that
would allow you to define [math]…[/math] and [display]…[/display]
to substitute the <SPAN CLASS=“math”>…</SPAN> and <DIV
CLASS=“math”>…</DIV> tags that correspond to the in-line and
display-math styles. The stuff in between the tags would be good old
TeX or (limited) LaTeX code.

The difficulty would be in getting the jsMath.js file loaded in the
first place, and then calling jsMath.Process() afterward. One could
have the [math] or [display] tags call in jsMath.js at that point, but
I’m not sure this would be efficient, as this might cause it to be run
several times, or even reloaded over the network several times (not all
browsers seem to cache the JavaScript files). jsMath.js does contain
an if-then to prevent it from running multiple times if it IS loaded
more than once, but since the file is a large one, it would be very
inefficient to do so unnecessarily.

Another option would be to have [math] and [display] insert some
JavaScript that would check if jsMath already loaded and load it if
not. Something like

    if (!window.jsMath) {document.writeln('<SCRIPT 

SRC=“jsMath.js”></SCRIPT>’)}

might do it. (But this will cause the font warning box to appear at
that point in the document, which might not be what you want.)
They would also need to insert <SCRIPT>jsMath.Process()</SCRIPT> after
the math, though it would be best to do this once for the complete
document rather than every math item.

A third approach would be to have [math] and [display] insert
JavaScript that sets the onload event handler for the document body so
that when the page is completed, the jsMath.Process() call is run, but
only if math has been entered on the page (since the onload handler
will not be set otherwise). It might even be possible to load
jsMath.js at that point, but I’m not sure of the timing issues that
might arise from that.

Finally, it looks like it is possible to customize what vBulletin
inserts around each message, so it would probably be possible to check
the message from [math] and [display] tags and insert the <SCRIPT
SRC=“jsMath.js”></SCRIPT> and <SCRIPT>jsMath.Process()</SCRIPT> around
any messages that include mathematics. If it is possible to maintain
state from message to message, you could check if you already loaded
jsMath and only insert that once (otherwise, you could have the
JavaScript on the page do that). But this is a more sophisticated bit
of programming, and would need to be tested carefully.

So it looks like they should be able to do it, and I know several other
bulletin boards that have been successful in using jsMath with their
messages.

If anybody is seriously interested in trying to wheedle the admins for math markup capabilities (and considering all the math and physics questions we deal with around here, I agree that it would be a nice feature), show 'em this quote.

[Mathochist]

@ultrafilter

It would probably require a hack of some kind, and you know how they feel about that. On the other hand, if MathML/LaTeX can be used to generate image files (and I bet they can), it might be workable.

Well, to the extent that a .dvi (DeVice Independant) is an “image” file, TeX does. MathML only produces an image file when coupled with a browser. Remember that XML in general is not intended to say what the result looks like, but to mark semantics and let the browser read it. One browser might interpret <title> as italicizing its argument and another might underline, for instance.

[OldGuy]

At one point I learned LaTeX, but now I use MathType. This is a program which will actually show you the equation in a window as it will appear. You acn ten embed this into Word documents as an OLE. It will also take your equation and write it as LaTeX which you can then cut and paste into a LaTeX document i fyou want. Furthermore, it lets you completely redefine the keyboard with modifiers so that <Ctl-G, a> inputs an alpha <Ctl-M, +> inputs a + or - sign, etc. It’s great.

I’m not associated with the porduct at all except as a very satisfied user.

Scientific Word does the latter as well, but I think not the former.