WP Math Publisher – wpmathpub Plugin

wpmathpub (aka WordPress Math Publisher) is based on Pascal Brachet’s PhpMathPublisher library.

Unfortunately Pascal’s links to phpMathPublisher are now gone. Instead BiophysicsLab has picked up support for this library for WordPress use. Support includes porting the original PHP 5 code to PHP 7.x, and the addition of the gradient symbol (Del) for display of vector field equations.

A quick set of examples and list of all shortcode tags with their associated LaTeX font symbols are included with the plugin in the Doc section. An online link to this file (https://www.biophysicslab.com/wp-content/plugins/wpmathpub/phpmathpublisher/doc/help.html)

Starting with version 1.0.7, use the wpmathpub plugin status display table from your blog’s admin site’s “Manage” or “Tools” menu. See screenshot #5 (in the screenshots tab) for details. The status display will:

• Check your system for correct access to required directories,
• Determine if required libraries are available, and
• Show a sample math conversion from text to image format.

Use the results within the table to help troubleshoot installation issues.

Starting with version 1.0.7, an enhanced priority scheme was implemented to improve reliability and better cooperation with some high bandwidth video streaming plugins.

At this time, only one plugin is known to play havoc with display of math images from within comments called: Live Comment Preview. Blog posts are not affected. This plugin causes the [pmath] start tag to get out of sync with the [/pmath] end tag.

If you suspect plugin interference, a simple test is to disable all of your plugins except wpmathpub. If wpmathpub works without other plugins, start turning on your plugins one by one to see which one(s) are interfering with [pmath] tag filtering. If you find one, let me know – I may be able to find a solution.

Use the wpmathpub plugin status display table from your blog’s admin site’s “Manage” or “Tools” menu

The ‘img’ directory needs write access to create new math images from your blog’s math text. Starting with version 1.0.5, the wpmathpub plugin automatically assigns the correct access rights to the ‘img’ directory on Linux/Unix installations. This auto-assignment feature can be turned off in wpmathpub.php by setting AUTOCHMOD to false:

define(“AUTOCHMOD”, false);

Below is a sample bash shell session demonstrating how to manually locate the ‘img’ directory, change its mode to include write access, and verify the change was made:

-bash-3.00$ cd wp-content

-bash-3.00$ cd plugins

-bash-3.00$ cd wpmathpub

-bash-3.00$ cd phpmathpublisher

-bash-3.00$ chmod 755 img

-bash-3.00$ stat -c %a img

755

-bash-3.00$ stat -c %A img

drwxr-xr-x

By default, the wpmathpub plugin supports user generated math equations in comments. Starting with wpmathpub plugin version 1.0.6, you can disable the use of [pmath] tags in comments by changing ENGAGECOMMENTS flag to false in wpmathpub.php:

define(“ENGAGECOMMENTS”, false);

This setting will not affect the display of math equations in blog posts and pages.

Starting in wpmathpub version 2.0.0, new symbols are recommended to replace the >, <, >=, <=, and <> test operators with gt, lt, ge, le, and ne.

Specifically, the “>” symbol and its HTML entity “& gt;” will create unusual results in the Gutenberg block editor.

Starting with wpmathpub version 1.0.5 both blog posts, pages, and comments support pmath tags.

You may go to the WordPress wpmathpub support page to ask questions to the community:
WordPress wpmathpub Support Page