Help talk:Displaying a formula

OCR tools

There is at least one OCR tool that can convert a handwritten formula to Latex and other formats. Mathpix allows 10 snips a month free. I don't know enough to edit the body of the Help page (I've not yet used Mathpix so don't know how good it is, and how compatible with Wikipedia, and don't know what else is out there), but I think there should be a Tools section with this sort of information. For now I've added an external link - feel free to delete if it's thought too commercial. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 22:57, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Comments?

I read somewhere that % was the comment-character in TeX; but that seems to render actual percentage-signs:

$\%hitherethisshouldbeacomment$

How can I write a comment in the source-code that doesn't appear in the rendered output? ELLIOTTCABLE (talk) 21:31, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know comments are not supported in Mediawiki's LaTeX implementation. –jacobolus (t) 02:04, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Adding a countour around a character in LaTeX Equations

How can we add contours (an outline around the character) to LaTeX equations, especially when an equation is using colors that cannot be clearly visible on white, such as yellow? Abhiramakella (talk) 21:48, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Can you be a little clearer about what you mean? Equations should not in general be using colors, or if they are the use should be restrained; there is no reason to ever use yellow in an equation on Wikipedia. –jacobolus (t) 02:03, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for contrib-stalking, but I got to do it to figure out the context. It looks like you're talking about the colors on Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance. My recommendation is: don't. The colors do not add much usefulness to the equations. Well, it's somewhat useful on the three kinds of r, but beyond that, don't. Artoria2e5 🌉 23:43, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Dumping all the texvc mentions

The help page retains a lot of mentions of the legacy OcaML texvc, which validates tex syntax and calls a real LaTeX program to do the rendering. It has ceased being a thing since MediaWiki 1.32 (2018), so it would make sense to stop referring to it. (Not texvcjs though: that's a bona fide part of Mathoid, the new stuff.)

The following sections need to be changed:

• Help:Displaying a formula#Alphabets and typefaces starts with saying texvc can't do stuff. The good news is Mathoid also can't (because texvcjs decides to), so just swap the mention out.
• Help:Displaying a formula#Color has some prominent mention of texvc. This one is going to be a little more complicated, because I'm honestly not sure whether the incompatibility in the last example is caused by the LaTeX program behind texvc or really "texvc" itself. This distinction matters because the Math extension (before version 1.39 -- is it old enough to be ignored?) has the ability to call a real LaTeX program in "png" mode.
  • In addition, we may also need to check compatibility with NIST's LaTeXML service. That, like the "png" mode, is obviously useless for English Wikipedia, but it could still be a good-to-have because this help page serves as some sort of a "global Extension:Math help page".
• Help:Displaying a formula#Unicode characters has one small mention. This is easy to fix, I should be able to do it right now.
• I think the legacy syntax list can stay for a while longer.

Artoria2e5 🌉 12:12, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Slightly lost on Wikipedia formatting for an article, could someone show me the code to render this?

It's from this URL:

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jap/article-abstract/82/6/2759/178858/Cross-relaxation-and-upconversion-coefficients-of

How do I render that Pr~ et al at the end? -- Very Polite Person (talk) 17:24, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

I figured it out... "Cross relaxation and upconversion coefficients of the mid-infrared transitions of Pr³⁺:LaCl₃". 17:39, 14 May 2024 (UTC)