zero-installation LaTeX-ish math for casual users?

Question

I teach physics at a community college, often to biology majors who are not math or computer geeks. For certain assignments, I require them to type up materials that include math. A typical application is writing half a page of notes on a textbook chapter. In the past, I suggested that they use OpenOffice for this, and I wrote up some instructions for them on how to use its equation editor. This is awkward, however, when they want to print their work on campus, since most of the campus computer labs don't have OpenOffice. OO's equation editor is also rather clumsy IMO.

Is there a better way to do this?

I am looking for a solution that is cross-platform and has zero cost (and preferably one that is open source). My students do not already know LaTeX, so there has to be some kind of GUI.

LyX has most of the same pros and cons as OO. I would really prefer a Web-2.0 zero-install solution rather than a standalone application.

Google Docs has pretty decent math support now, and most of the math features are fairly easy to use, although I was baffled by how to produce exponents using the GUI. It's not LaTeX, but it does have a lot of LaTeX symbols built in as keyboard shortcuts (and typing x^2 was the only way I could find to get $x^2$). Unless I hear about something better, this is the solution I'm leaning toward. Printing is extremely awkward. When you do File:Print from Google Docs' interface within the browser, you get a PDF file which contains the equations rendered as lousy-looking bitmaps. I dislike the fact that it's not open-source.

I like the way MathJax works in SE, for me, in Firefox. Is there any system analogous to Google Docs that uses MathJax? The main reasons I'm not leaning toward such a solution are that: (a) my students need a GUI; and (b) for a student walking into a campus computer lab and using IE on Windows, I believe there would be a significant performance hit while the fonts were downloaded. On my linux box at home, printing sort of works, but not well -- equations are rendered in a font that is the wrong size, and they overlap the surrounding text.

Solutions based on ASCIIMath will produce hassles for students using IE on Windows, since they'll either need to download the MathType plugin or switch to Firefox -- and they can't necessarily do either of these things in a campus computer lab.

Answer 1

Assuming your students know enough TeX to write the math stuff themselves (I mean without a GUI for writing equations, otherwise check codecogs which might help for previsualization), ScribTEX could be an option.

• Pros: free of charge up to 3 projects, version control, on-line compilation (the resulting PDF is automatically downloaded)
• Cons: needs to have a working connexion

(Note that I didn't test its performance beyond the sample demonstration file.)

Answer 2

It might not be your job to do this, but I'll say this nevertheless:

Good skills in document creation are worth a lot. If your students didn't learn it at university so far, consider teaching them the basics and doing them a great favor. You don't need to get into complicated Latex stuff with many different document classes and all that. You can give them a sort of template, with which they can work. Knowing how to write a formula in math mode is never a useless skill either. It'd maybe take 2 or 3 hours of introducing it to your students once and you'll have taught them something more applicable than probably any other specific topic. If your students don't know about such things yet, it's about time they learn at least the basics.

I've used office software for a long time myself, mostly LibreOffice and OpenOffice, with which I always could keep up with the MS Word people, but since I started using Pandoc and therefore Pandoc templates, which contain Latex code and started typing markdown including math code, my documents have become so much more clean and better organized, I really regret not having learned it earlier. As a computer science person, I also like the fact that plain text formats (which then are compiled to PDFs) enable you to use version control systems, but that might be out of scope for your students.

There is also stackedit and markx, which require only markdown knowledge and math mode. Markdown can really be more or less learned in a day, if one is willing and as I already said knowledge about the math mode is never wrong to have.

Answer 3

Just came across your question. Maybe too late, but better later than never. I think https://www.overleaf.com meets your criteria.

Answer 4

latexlab.org attempts to be like Google Docs, but with LaTeX. I haven't personally used it much, just because I don't have much reason to, but I've heard good things. It's not WYSIWYG, but it has many helper GUI functions, somewhat similar to TeXNicCenter. (They could even do the editing at home with LyX, export to LaTeX, then use that site to make small changes elsewhere, if that's what's convenient.)

Answer 5

I made a tutorial for the tutoring center at my university that touches on this topic.

Believe it or not, the equation editor in Microsoft Word is actually quite powerful: (1) It can be accessed quickly with some hotkey like alt-=. (2) It can convert LaTeX-like commands--including ones for complex structures such as matrices--into visible mathematics in real-time. (3) It can be configured quickly (about 5 min.) to support numbered equations and cross-references.

This might be the most student-liked, accessible solution in your case!

However, I actually feel that Libre (Open) Office Math syntax and support is much simpler and more easily accessible to the beginner. Points (1), (3) apply for it, too. It's a shame that the software isn't more readily available, but I hear that it will soon be available online.

Answer 6

https://Mathcha.io Works well specially if they are no computer geek.

Answer 7

Verbosus.com is also a good alternative like Overleaf