I have moved my comments policy, with help entering equations<\/a> to its own page, accessible from the top bar above.<\/p>\n Recently, a few people have had trouble leaving comments on the site, due to incorrectly formatting equations, and some capricious comment mulilation by the WordPress software.\u00a0 It took me a little while to figure out the exact rules since apparently the comment box which you<\/em> would enter text into, has slighly different rules than the ones I<\/em> enter text into as a logged-in user.<\/p>\n So here’s the deal.\u00a0 WordPress uses < and > to enclose html tags.\u00a0 For example, if you write “<b>this is bold<\/b>” in a comment, you’ll see “this is bold<\/strong>“.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this means that if you include an < followed by an > in your comment, WordPress will interpret whatever is in between as an html tag, and\u2014even if it is not a valid html tag\u2014will simply delete everything in between them!\u00a0 Even I will be unable to see what you originally wrote.\u00a0 So do NOT use > or < to mean greater than or less than (unless you use just one kind, or only >’s followed by <‘s… but the safest rule is just to avoid them entirely…).<\/p>\n If you want to include greater than or less than symbols, you can write them as $${\\mathrm \\$\\$\\verb|\\|\\mathrm{gt}\\$\\$}$$ or $${\\mathrm \\$\\$\\verb|\\|\\mathrm{lt}\\$\\$}$$.\u00a0 That will look like > or < respectively.\u00a0 Or better still, put your entire equation inside of the double dollar signs using LaTeX notation.<\/p>\n [quietfanatic points out in a comment below that you can also use the html escapes $$\\&$$gt; or $$\\&$$lt; if you don’t want to use the double dollar signs.]<\/p>\n Also, do NOT try to use wordpress.com latex notation (which has a single dollar signs, and the magic word “latex”).\u00a0 It won’t work!\u00a0 There is a difference between wordpress.com<\/span> and wordpress.org<\/span>.\u00a0 The former is a website used to host WordPress blogs, while the latter is where you download software to host your own WordPress blog.\u00a0 This is a WordPress.org blog which is hosted on my family server, wall.org.<\/p>\n In order to put LaTeX in a wordpress.org blog, you have to install a special plugin to do so.\u00a0 You might think that this plugin would use the same notation as wordpress.com, but no it doesn’t.\u00a0 Instead you type $$\\$\\$\\mathrm{E = mc\\verb|^|2}\\$\\$ $$ to get $$E = mc^2$$, and type $$\\$\\$!\\mathrm{E = mc\\verb|^|2.}\\$\\$ $$ to break it out into a separate line like so: $$!E = mc^2.$$\u00a0 It’s best not to put any spaces after the dollar signs in this case, or they’ll make a weird indentation in the next line, as shown here.<\/p>\n Got it?\u00a0 Good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have moved my comments policy, with help entering equations to its own page, accessible from the top bar above. Recently, a few people have had trouble leaving comments on the site, due to incorrectly formatting equations, and some capricious … Continue reading