## Sunday, March 30, 2008

### Spiffy LaTeX script for Blogger!

I love the internet these days! A quick Google search can provide you with all sorts of nifty (although probably in the long run not so useful) information and tools. In this particular case (that inspired this blog post), I suddenly developed a hankering for the ability to use LaTeX notation for mathematical and logical notation on Blogger--not that I'll probably ever use it, mind you, and not that I'm even that familiar with LaTeX--but I digress. Blogger doesn't support LaTeX natively, but one swift search later and I'd discovered this Greasemonkey script which, after a very painless installation, sticks a nice friendly button on to the Blogger post editor. This button converts LaTeX notation into images and automatically uploads them into your post for manipulation. (This is all providing that you use Firefox. But of course you use FireFox! Just like any other self-respecting net citizen these days.)

Multipurpose example (to prove that it's working; to see how it looks with my blog colors; to increase my familiarity with LaTeX... or should I say, $\LaTeX{}$):

$\forall x:\forall y:[x=y \to \forall F:Fx\leftrightarrow Fy]$

Or something. Loosely a formulation of Leibniz' Indiscernibility of Identicals. This isn't an ideal solution to notational problems (for example, if you want to make a change in a really lengthy expression, you'd better have copied the text version somewhere because it doesn't convert from images back to text. Also, perhaps not so useful when writing away from my home computer, at least not if I want to see how the results turn out). But man, it's still pretty awesome to have something this convenient. Trés cool!

As a thanks to the author, here's a link to his/her blog (linking there is what he/she recommends by way of thanks): http://servalx02.blogspot.com/