LaTeX on Stack Overflow? [closed]

Question

MathOverflow has an awesome engine where you can embed LaTeX in questions, answers, and comments. Can we get something like this going on Stack Overflow?

I think it’d be appropriate as I at least pretty often want to write something like n^2 and would benefit greatly from prettier markup.

Answer 1

This is implemented on http://math.stackexchange.com -- you can check it out there. It will never be on Stack Overflow, though, as it is an extremely heavy dependency. (See also Nick's investigations about impact in November 2013.)

Info here: TeX math markup is sorely needed

Answer 2

As a workaround, you can easily embed LaTeX by generating an image of the equation using the following WYSIWYG editor: https://codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php.

Answer 3

Having LaTeX support on Stack Overflow would be great. After all SO is about programming, which covers algorithms. And some algorithms are easier explained if one can typeset math. For example whenever it comes to complicated transformation issues regarding 3D graphics, being able to typeset those matrices would be a huge benefit.

Answer 4

Although I'm a big LaTeX fan, I don't think the work would be justified for Stack Overflow.

Since Stack Overflow is one of the sites on the web that gets Unicode right, you can do standard things like

K ⊆ A

or

O(n²)

anyway. And <sub> and <sup> are whitelisted, so you can even do more complicated things like

k_1,…,n

or

e^ɣ2n-1

Answer 5

It would be fantastic to have this. There are times when a statistical programming question arises where either Stack Overflow or Cross Validated would be an appropriate site (maybe Stack Overflow will have the edge), but I would rather see it on Cross Validated simply, because one can have LaTeX formatting.

The use case is pretty simple: Joe comes along with a question about how to do X in R (or MATLAB, Python, whatever), and there's an issue with his math and his implementation. For example: the two don't match. Another scenario is that of this question, where we could Q&A on the mathematical inverse, and a good way to code the transformation. It is irritating to address the mathematics within an environment where the formatting support is weak. Both sites (Stack Overflow and Cross Validated) have adequate support for presenting code, so the winner is the site that supports the formatting of mathematics. The same is true for $\textrm{computational math} \setminus \textrm{statistics}$ and the Stack Exchange site Mathematics. ;-)

To that end, I hope that moderators will accept some flags that suggest that a question is better for Mathematics or Cross Validated based on topic, audience, etc. and the ease of answering the question with the available formatting tools.

Answer 6

For simple math, you may use this user script. It adds a math bar to the editor for some commonly used symbols:

Answer 7

While I think that most questions asked on SO where it would be useful to use math formatting are probably off-topic and more appropriate for CS Stack Exchange, it would still be much easier in many cases just to answer the question on SO than to try and migrate it. I don't see how having the math formatting on SO would conflict with anything else. Some people simply don't know about CS Stack Exchange, and so it is easier to ask a question on SO.

I know I have answered questions on SO where the math notation would have been useful. There are instances where you want to talk about algorithm complexity while working with code in a particular language.

As another note, why the heck can't I get code coloring on CS Stack Exchange? Since CS Stack Exchange is smallish and there is a decent amount of overlap between CS Stack Exchange and SO, I really think we ought to just merge them and support math typesetting in SO.

Basically, BOO to the people that declined to implement this. It shouldn't be hard, since it is already in place on other sites, and it wouldn't really conflict with anything. If I knew more about how the sites worked, I would do it myself.