MathTran – The Research Kitchen

MathTran is a very popular (and useful) web service which performs a similar function to Google Charts – hit it with a valid TeX formula and it will return an image representation of the formula. Jonathan Fine has written a JavaScript wrapper which enables you to mark up img tags with alt values like “tex:[formula]” and these are automagically converted to images.

For example, the tag

<img alt="tex:\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}\sigma}\int_{-\infty}^{x}{e^{-\frac{(x-\mu)^2}{2\sigma^2}}}dx">

will be converted to:

$tex:\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}\sigma}\int_{-\infty}^{x}{e^{-\frac{(x-\mu)^2}{2\sigma^2}}}dx$

I have taken the MathTran source script and modified it slightly – MathTran allows you to specify a size parameter, between 1 and 9. This is not available via the default script, but I added the ability to have the img tag take a “size” parameter. This can be used like so:

<alt="tex:\sum_{0}^{\infty}x_i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}" size="2">

An example below:

$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$
$tex:\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}x^i = \frac{1}{(1-x)}$

UPDATE: I made a slight modification to add the raw TeX source to the title attribute of the img tag, so if you hover on a generated MathTran image, you should see the original formula.

UPDATE (2012) – this doesnt work anymore – now using the lovely MathJAX!

If you want to get the (modified) MathTran script, it is here: http://www.theresearchkitchen.com/blog/wp-includes/js/mathtran.js