Getting our own LaTeX

[Mao]

As I understand it right now, LaTeX is still running off daniel15's server. There have been quite a few occasions where LaTeX was temporarily down. Should we spend some time to get this running our own servers, or even just use the Google API?

[It is currently down, and quite annoying]

[jaccerz]

wtf is latex?

[Mao]

Math typesetting in posts, extremely useful and very popular.

[jaccerz]

ahhhh. i see.

[Russ]

quadratic formula!

not that I ever use latex though, either here or for work, so I have no idea what the dropouts are like

[dcc]

Assuming they have (shell) access to the server, then it would be trivial to set such a thing up.  In Year 12 I wrote a progressive LaTeX renderer with HTML/JS/PHP and that was dead easy - I don't think it'd be too much trouble.  But you might want to host it on a different subdomain (like tools.atarnotes.com or latex.atarnotes.com), for performance reasons (keeping static (with respect to the users login) content on a different subdomain means the user doesn't have to send their cookies with every request for an image (of which there might be many for a sufficiently complicated mathematical derivation), saving a whole bunch of overhead and a little bit of $$).

[Mao]

Assuming they have (shell) access to the server, then it would be trivial to set such a thing up.  In Year 12 I wrote a progressive LaTeX renderer with HTML/JS/PHP and that was dead easy - I don't think it'd be too much trouble.  But you might want to host it on a different subdomain (like tools.atarnotes.com or latex.atarnotes.com), for performance reasons (keeping static (with respect to the users login) content on a different subdomain means the user doesn't have to send their cookies with every request for an image (of which there might be many for a sufficiently complicated mathematical derivation), saving a whole bunch of overhead and a little bit of $$).

Yeah, I can't imagine it being too difficult to deploy, esp considering dan knows the webhost.
But then judging by the volume of traffic on the maths boards, it'll be much cheaper to just use the google api, which will be dead easy to script (tex -> uri compatible -> google charts url embedded img), this doesn't even need any mods on the server!

[dcc]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/516406/latex-equivalent-to-google-chart-api

read a few of the top results - the google API isn't as beautiful as some of the others