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#slack-help
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2021-01-30
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CTW16:01:09

What is the best way to communicate maths on slack? $F=ma$-type expressions seem to work on other outlets

seancorfield17:01:25

@clark.thomaswilliam Probably unicode symbols if you can do it that way?

CTW17:01:07

Thanks, I was hoping there was some hidden support for TeX but I guess Unicode should do. I find it truly baffling that digital maths (or some kind of maths subset DSL) doesn't seem to have been standardised yet. In the meantime I'll look into Unicode exports though. Thanks again!

seancorfield17:01:09

Us mathematicians are always woefully underserved by text-based chat systems 🙂

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andy.fingerhut18:01:15

You can always use some other system that reads TeX and creates JPG/PNG/etc. and copy and paste those, but of course they would not be in-line in the text (unless that is possible and I'm not aware of it)

CTW19:01:43

Thank you muchly to both of you. The image export system is of course doable but it's a pet peeve of mine that it shouldn't be necessary. I'm not a mathematician ( just a physicist) but I would have thought that it was quite an important language :). I think some sort of unicode conversion is the way to go for now. The dream is that one day, TeX and mathjax will be replaced with some kind of maths lisp!

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andy.fingerhut19:01:54

I would think that there are some Slack workspaces and/or other on-line chat/discussion systems like Discord, ZulipChat, or something that people who want to use a lot of TeX-like math notation often use, and have set up something convenient there.

andy.fingerhut19:01:18

Then again, for such people, some of them can read TeX source code as easily as the nicely formatted version 🙂

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CTW17:02:48

Just wanted to say that I discovered Zulip and there seems to be fairly nice default maths support there.

blak3mill3r04:02:22

Someone could make a Slack plugin that responds to TeX by rendering a PNG for you...

seancorfield04:02:29

@UC681SR17 Except, on a free plan, we're very limited on integrations and the admin team here, in general, doesn't grant any requests for integrations at this point...

blak3mill3r04:02:52

I didn't know of that limitation; bummer. Then I thought, why not do it in the browser, and boom: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/latex-in-slack/pfcfelfnpbnboelkjedecjipaibpnfja?hl=en it exists already as a chrome plugin

blak3mill3r04:02:59

I have not tried this ^

seancorfield05:02:41

Oh, that's kind of cool... I wonder if it'll work with Edge (Chromium)?

seancorfield05:02:33

Yup... $\bar\chi^{\\*}\\_W$

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seancorfield05:02:38