Some useful tools ...

I expect I will have a need to present math, diagrams, charts, tables, R code. So there are a number of HTML tools I am going to need to get started. My HTML experience to date amounts to modifying pre-existing templates on blogger, so I have a fair way to go.

Rendering Math:

First up: the John Forkosh Associates website seems to be a good resource for presenting math on the web. Follow the links related to mathTeX - there's a tutorial.

I found a gadget that renders LaTeX in Blogger. The "Equation Tools" logo you can see in the sidebar will be added when you install the gadget. You can edit out the logo and links from your installation.

I found this nice on-line LaTeX equation editor. I added the extra link to the "Equation Tools" widget. Once you have got the equation (it is rendered in real-time) exactly how you want it, just paste the LaTeX code between \ [ ...and... \ ]

So, here is an example of what should be a familiar equation:

\[P(x<=X)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma }}\int_{-\infty }^{\frac{(X-\mu)}{\sigma}}e^{-\frac{1}{2}(\tfrac{x-\mu }{\sigma })^{2}}}dx\]

Nice! Let me know if I screwed it up!

Apparently you can make quite sophisticated diagrams and geometries in LaTeX, but I suspect I will use MSVisio and render png images from that for any flowcharts or simple geometric diagrams.

Now I just have to figure out how to insert boxes with scroll bars and contain simple text that can be cut and pasted by readers. I want to use courier to get that "text-editor" feel. This is what I have so far, seems like a good start:

So here's some text that should fill up the row and flow off the screen forcing the scroll bars to appear.

A line followed by a line break.

And another line.

And another.

finally enough to force a vertical scroll bar.

Finally, I need to figure out a good way to do tables without the endless table-row-data tags ... ugh. So far, my research suggests I am stuck with the "hard way":

Table Title		Table Top Header
		Table Col Title	Table Col Title
Table Side Header	Table Row Title	Table cell 1,1	Table cell 1,2
	Table Row Title	Table cell 2,1	Table cell 2,2

I shall work on the general format and layout of the blog going forward. In this way I hope to become versed in HTML, and possibly some scripting, in addition to trying to learn R and Java.