Matrix/Element and Mathematics

Hardware Librem 5
1

It seems that the possibility to write Mathematics in element-desktop using TeX notation, has been added although no person picked-up the Google summer code project. Someone did it for free. The feature is experimental and needs to enabled manually by the user, but it works fine. So I thought to write it here for two reasons. First, of course if anyone needs it to know how to enable it. Second I have to find solution for my L5 and maybe someone knows how to do it on L5. Because currently there is no port of element-desktop for atm64 (or I did not find it). Or maybe, since it is done for element it could be now easy to add this to fractal too(?)

The configuration is as follows:

  1. go to a room
  2. upper right go to the (i) symbol
  3. room settings cog wheel
  4. advanced
  5. open devtools
  6. settings explorer
  7. change feature_latex_maths to:

{
“device”: true,
“room-device”: null,
“room-account”: null,
“account”: null,
“room”: null,
“config”: null,
“default”: false
}

Essentially the only thing you need to change is the line “device”: true,
(from null to true). And then you are ready to write and receive Mathematics.

(Element desktop has one glitch. You can not change keyboard language with Alt+Shift easily, since the language changes but the menu of the program is for some reason enabled, and you have to click in the writing field with the mouse to be able to write again. This is annoying and maybe someone knows what is wrong. By the way this problem does not exist when Element is launched from the web (app.element.io)).

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2

Thanks for this post! That’s really cool. Do you just have to use $ symbols to enter math mode, like in markdown?

So $ \int_{0}^{\inf} $ would be what to type?

3

Yes. And display-mode works too!!

Try $\int_\alpha^\beta \sqrt[n]{x} dx$ and then try
$$\int_\alpha^\beta \sqrt[n]{x} dx$$

Works great. I hope we will get this functionality in L5 at some point…

4

Element desktop is Element web but pakaged with electron.
You can use it on your L5 in your web browser, but only in desktop mode. Make it as a PWA is at the bottom of Element.io backlog (https://github.com/vector-im/roadmap/projects/1).

You can use hydrogen, another client that is already a PWA, but it’s experimental. I don’t know if TeX notation will work with it.

5

I tested hydrogen. It is indeed very fast and adapts on small screens. But no TeX support.
By the way, I saw that the TeX capability was added to element-android 4 days ago (if this is what the last comment here means: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/2133) so I guess it will appear in the next element-android version. Still no good solution for L5 unless element-android works with anbox(?).

Yes, the TeX support works fine on L5 on firefox, but you have to scale the screen to at least 1.25, since element does not adapt to small screens.

1 Like