## Mimetex

August 20th, 2007 | Categories: Latex | Tags:

Just as every walk (including random ones) must begin with a first step – every blog must have a first post. For my first post I thought I would mention the rather wonderful program that will allow me to use Latex to write equations on here – Mimetex.

The first solution that my web guru and I attempted to use was something called LatexRenderer but you need to have Latex installed on your web server to use it and for various reasons this was not possible for us. Mimetex, however, does not require Latex to be installed on your server so we gave that a go.

Once you have installed and activated the Mimetex plugin for wordpress all you need to do is put your Latex code between the two tags [ tex][ /tex] (without spaces) and it will be automatically rendered as an image. This makes it very easy to write equations such as

The output from Mimetex is not quite as nice as that of LatexRenderer and it only supports a subset of Latex but the ease of installation more than makes up for this.

1. look at Mathjax http://www.mathjax.org/
it too doesn’t require latex to be installed on the server. It is completely javascript based and does Latex and MathML.