iliyan

OK, I see your point. I guess it's now time for the decision makers to consider whether it will be worth the effort. I did what I could to advertise the idea and its utility, and now I can only cross my fingers

Thanks for the time and consideration so far!

My suggestion was to do something that's super easy and does the job to 95%. And I'm sure math support is not a priority for the Evernote team. My main wish is to get at least some support as soon as possible, hence my proposal.

I'm still not sure where you get the notion that this is all so easy for Evernote to implement.

Because what I'm suggesting is just another way of plugging an image into an Evernote note. This image just happens to represent some formula. As I showed above, it can be done even in the current version, just that the user has to do it manually. Implementing a function that grabs the selection in the document, makes an HTTP GET request to some URL (that includes that selected text) which returns an image file, and finally replaces that text in the document with the obtained image, this should not be too hard to do, right? If I had access to the source code, I would probably be able to implement this feature for the Windows client in less than an hour. Error handling (checking whether the text is a valid LaTeX markup) is already handled by the web service. Is it not really a purely UI feature what I'm suggesting?

The point about MathML is that it, being XML-based, can be readily checked for correctness against a DTD or schema - something .ENEX import already does. I would hope that'd be a big help in this.

And, yes, I know the format alone isn't enough: As has been stated, authoring tools are required.

One other thing: I would expect most browsers by now to be able to render MathML. Maybe that's naive. :-)

Martin

I see your point and if HTML packages have built-in MathML support that Evernote can just use, that's ok. But first I think that's not the case, and second - going for this means you won't see any math support in Evernote any time soon probably. My suggestion was to do something that's super easy and does the job to 95%. And I'm sure math support is not a priority for the Evernote team. My main wish is to get at least some support as soon as possible, hence my proposal.

To be fair to Dave, your original proposal was automatic conversion of '$' delimited text into LaTex generated images. By changing the requirements to a right-click option after Dave replied to you is just moving the goalposts. BTW, I do think that a user-initiated approach is better in the context of Evernote.

OK, in the original suggestion I proposed both an automatic and a manual ways of doing the conversion, I'm sorry. Of course, an automatic way (by having the user explicitly specify the delimiter) would be very convenient and still easy to implement, I believe. But I'm totally fine with having a manual option only.

Ok. So I'm going to suggest MathML as a "more in spirit with the Evernote world" thing - being XML (and we've now established LaTeX isn't).

I don't see your point. MathML is an XML format for representing formulas with structure, so it can be interpreted. You don't write MathML manually - you use other tools to construct a formula which is then saved in MathML format. You don't want to complicate Evernote at this point with such things. LaTeX is the language you want people to write their formulas and it's the easiest thing to do, as my post above shows. And storing in in plain text in the ALT (or some custom) attribute of the image is just enough.

Attached is a screenshot. What I currently can do is go to the web site of the service, type in my formula in their text field and then drag the image to Evernote. This obviously works but it's very inconvenient. Very nice to have would be to be just able to select a piece of text, right lick and choose "Convert to a math formula" which would just automate this process. For modification, you could right click on the image and choose an option that will replace the image with the original text stored in the ALT attribute or popup a small text box where you could edit the text and Evernote would regenerate the image.

The result is quite good IMO. Also, imagine if you had notes sharing between people (which is probably e feature you're already considering) how useful this can be for education and collaboration! And in its most basic version, this purely UI feature is really a few lines of code to implement.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Things like this are a little more complicated in Evernote because we store note data in a form of HTML that is then "rendered" for viewing separately on every platform: web (4 different browsers), mac, windows, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Palm WebOS, WinPhone7, etc...

So any little tricky special syntax that we add needs to have corresponding rendering code added to every single client, or else we'll receive anger from the users of each platform because we (e.g.) failed to add LaTeX support on BlackBerry, so their notes are unreadable.

This is why we tend to prefer using existing web-friendly renderings like JPEG, GIF, PDF, etc. rather than ad-hoc markup within the notes for each separate community and feature.

That's not a problem at all, you've misunderstood my idea. The only thing needed is an option in the context menu that converts the selected text to an "existing web-friendly renderings like JPEG, GIF, PDF, etc." by using a web service that interprets the text as LateX (or MathML). That's everything!

Now, if the stored image has an ALT attribute that contains the original piece of text the user had selected, then it would also be possible to modify that text and redo the web-service query to update the image. To the rest of Evernote this is just a simple image. No markup, special handling, nothing!

I wouldn't have asked for this feature if I wasn't convinced it was super simple to do.

Indeed, the delimiter can be configured (I actually don't want it to be $ as in LaTeX), and the original code can be stored in an ALT attribute in the image. I know this is not a very common request, but IMO the best feature of LaTeX is its math typesetting system. LaTeX is almost exclusively for scientific publications, as well as for books that contain formulas.

My main argument is that a very simple to implement UI feature can unleash great possibilities and expand your user base. I will personally take care of spreading the word And this will be a unique feature of Evernote. It's simple, but the ability to take notes with nice formatting and include formulas in them would be greatly appreciated by scientific people.