(written by: Willy Yanto Wijaya)
For those who are not familiar with LateX, writing mathematical equations in WordPress might be something troublesome and confusing. Furthermore, many of you may not have much time to learn about the syntax of LateX.
So is there other way to write mathematical equations without LateX?
Yes, there is.
By converting the mathematical equation into a graphic (picture) file (such as .jpg, .png, etc)
How to do that?
Here are simple steps to do it:
1. Write the equation (such as using Microsoft Equation) in a Ms. Powerpoint slide.
2. Right-click the equation, and then choose “Save as Picture…”
3. Choose save as type .png (I recommend to save as .png since generally it has better quality than .jpg. Actually so far as I know .tiff is best but unfortunately this file type is not supported by WordPress)
Can we just directly uploaded the .png file? Yes, we can. But the result will be like this:
For those you who are perfectionist, I know that you will not accept an image with such a quality. Well, so let’s do another step:
4. Using a simple image software (such as Ms. Office Picture Manager), choose “edit picture”, then compress picture to document size. After that, just save the modified picture as a new file (.jpg or .png). (You will notice that the new file will have much bigger size, in my case it became about 29 kB from previously only 3 kB — but 29 kB is still reasonably a small size for webpage purpose).
When uploaded to WordPress, it looks approximately like this (.jpg file):
I suppose that this is already good enough. But if you still feel not satisfied, you can do this alternative step:
5. Using the picture (.png) file of step 3, increase the dpi of the .png file (using for example Adobe Photoshop or other software). When the dpi is increased, the file size will also increase. But we can reduce the size (using such as simple Ms. Office Picture Manager – just choose the “edit pictures” and then “resize” and then adjust the “percentage of original width and height” to fit our desired file size).
The above equation (.png) has the size just 26 kB (smaller than the previous 29 kB .jpg file and also better quality). I recommend you to do step 1, 2, 3 then 5 for best quality mathematical equation visual for WordPress.
If you have any ideas, comments, suggestions or other insights, please feel free to write them down in the comments section of this page.
Hope that this little tip/ trick can be useful for you.. =)
Btw, the above equation is the derivation form of van’t Hoff equation to determine the equilibrium constant of chemical reactions with respect to temperature change.