Cleve’s Corner, Blogs Edition

This is the debut of the MATLAB Central Blogs edition of Cleve's Corner. For years, I have been writing a column named Cleve's Corner in MathWorks News and Notes. The News and Notes Edition is in an electronic magazine format that is published once or twice a year and that has very specific length and word count constraints. The Blogs Edition can be any length, and I hope to have enough time and interesting material to post a couple of times per month. In fact, I may revive some old newsletter Corners, bring them up to date, and post them here.

I am pleased to be able to use MATLAB and its publish command as my Web authoring environmnent. I have been writing MATLAB code for even longer than I have been writing newsletter columns. Now I can write a blog without learning a new word processor.

I am also pleased to be able to use MathJax to display typeset mathematics. MathJax is, among other things, a LaTex interpreter written in JavaScript that displays mathematics properly in modern Web browsers. Here's an example. My next blog posting will involve a discussion of $phi$, the Golden Ratio. Now look again at that Greek letter $phi$. It should have the correct font size and, most importantly, have the same baseline as the surrounding text. This is how $phi$ would have looked before MathJax. The old $phi$ is a .png image. Some browsers place it far above the baseline of rest of the sentence. If you zoom in on the page, or print the page, the new $phi$ should scale and print nicely, but the old $phi$ will show the pixelation inherent in an sampled image.

MathJax has been developed by Davide Cervone of Union College and at Design Science, the makers of the MathType equation editor. MathJax has the support of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), the AMS (American Mathematical Society), the AIP (American Institute of Physics), a few other professional societies, and several publishers. For more about MathJax, see the recent article by Cervone in the AMS Notices.




Published with MATLAB® 7.14

|
  • print

Comments

To leave a comment, please click here to sign in to your MathWorks Account or create a new one.