Mephisto LaTeX plugin patch

Written by thomas on November 7th, 2006

After a reinstall of Mephisto everything’s back up and running as it should. Now, back on topic.

When researching the available blogging softwares, I ran across Mephisto in an attempt of finding myself a Ruby on Rails based software. One of my primary wishes for my new blog was the ability to easily include [LaTeX] equations in my webpages. The only viable alternative which had LaTeX support was WordPress, which I’ve been told has quite a number of issues. After some inquiring in the #mephisto channel, somebody offered to code up a plugin, and a couple of days later the LatexRenderer plugin was born.

Excellent as it was, I still wanted more ;) A couple of versions later, the LatexRenderer patch was done. The original plugin takes the code as:

< filter : latex >
$x = \frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$
< / filter : latex >

, minus the spaces that is, and renders the equation as an image.

What I added to the plugin was the ability to quickly show the underlying LaTeX source code. Rendering the above equation now gives us:

If you click on the equation, the image disappears and the source code appears. Click again, and you’ll get the image back.

I hope somebody will find this a useful feature, and hopefully Jan will include the patch in the official plugin.