# LaTeX math support ?

I'm hoping we can get the same math support that other SE sites (math.SE in particular) are making use of. Does anyone know how to enable this ?

Here's a test to see if the current system works by default: $t^2$

• Without LaTeX support, I would probably heavily favour MathOverflow instead. Aug 16 '10 at 21:52
• The other sites do have the support, so it's not technically difficult. I've also asked a question on meta.stackoverflow about this. Aug 16 '10 at 21:54
• After just a few questions and answers, I am ready to buckle: dear moderators, PLEEEEASE, pretty please, pretty please with sprinkles and unicorns on top, turn on TeX support! How on earth is one supposed to convey anything in TCS without at least a few Greek letters, reasonable-looking sub/superscripts, and summation/binomials/ceiling&floor/top&bottom/arrows/models/turnstile/subset/square-root/infinity? Aug 17 '10 at 1:26
• András, it took a few days for all the other sites, so we might need to be a little patient :). At least technically it seems merely to be a matter of turning on a flag for this subdomain. Aug 17 '10 at 3:19
• Just posted a question on meta.math: meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/671/… Aug 17 '10 at 22:34

Alright, community support for this looks pretty high.

I've enabled Tex.

• Great, many thanks! Aug 19 '10 at 20:36
• Huge kudos! Thanks! Aug 21 '10 at 18:17
• It's working great -- thank you. Aug 24 '10 at 12:54

This discussion on meta.math appears to have a solution to the problem, and in fact Geoff Dalgas is one of our moderators too. Geoff, can we have math markup enabled for this site ?

Update: in the meantime, we can use John Gietzen's greasemonkey script directly (if you use firefox). I have it installed and can see the $t^2$ in the original question.

• I've tried installing greasemonkey as well as the script, but I still see the dollar sign notation... Hopefully the LaTeX switch is flipped soon! Aug 17 '10 at 17:17
• you have to edit the script to include cstheory.stackexchange.com and meta.cstheory.stackexchange.com on the list of applicable sites. Aug 17 '10 at 17:21

MathOverflow just switched to MathJax. It looks really nice.

• that's cool. I know they were trying it out. I'm quite happy with the MathJax rendering here (and even installed it on my personal webpage) Aug 29 '10 at 6:02
• I wish Wikipedia would use MathJax. Their math rendering is...not as good. Aug 29 '10 at 7:14

They use jsMath, but some people seem to prefer the newest MathJax, AFAIU. A good starting point may be this thread : add LaTeX support to Markdown/WMD

Hope this helps.

• Problem is that I don't think we have control over this. The SE overlords have to implement the fix, I believe. Aug 16 '10 at 22:04
• The math.SE (math.stackexchange.com) is already using MathJax, which seems to work well. We just need someone at StackExchange to switch it on here. Aug 16 '10 at 22:15

I have javascript errors running MathJax.js on IE 8.0.7600.16385.

• Have you tried mathjax.org/demos ? Aug 23 '10 at 22:30
• Interestingly, the demos work incredibly well. Here I get the following error: Webpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Zune 4.0) Timestamp: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:04:48 UTC Message: No such element Line: 35 Char: 3 Code: 0 URI: meta.cstheory.stackexchange.com/content/js/third-party/MathJax/… Is anyone else with IE8 having problems?
– Ross Snider
Aug 24 '10 at 0:05
• have you tried poking around meta.{math,stats,tex} ? Aug 24 '10 at 4:03
• Nothing. :-(. Due to the lack of resonance from other IE8 users (if there are any here...) I have to conclude that I am the lonely source of these errors. For the record, the LaTeX scripts running on MathOverflow also break. Luckily this is only my work computer and the LaTeX scripts work just fine from home.
– Ross Snider
Aug 24 '10 at 22:45
• Magically it started working just now!
– Ross Snider
Aug 24 '10 at 23:19

Can anyone tell me why I get a [Math Processing Error] in most of the questions? I see Suresh's t^2 in this quote just fine, but I can't see anything in the parent site.

• It seems that some cache poisoning is causing trouble. Try clearing your browser cache explicitly Sep 1 '10 at 22:20
• That worked, thank you. :-) Sep 1 '10 at 23:56