Publishing POST on Web and Sending Emails with LaTeX Math symbols

Shibo Liu, January 25, 2023 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Remark 1. After I got this idea, I learned from an answer to a post (shared to me by a friend in Taiwan) of StackExchange (See the answer provided by Omar Hijab) that one can also copy the text (with the math generated via “TeX for Gmail”) from the composing box of Gmail, then paste into the composing box of your non-Gmail email account. I have tested this approach and it works well. I could not observe any difference in the result between the two approaches.

Usually this “Copy + Paste” method is more convenient than my “Forward” method, but if “Copy + Paste” fails, try my “Forward” method.

Remark 2. The method mentioned in the above remark can also be used to compose POST with LaTeX mathematical formula and post in web-pages, provided the website support composing POST in HTML mode. Just compost the POST in Gmail and then copy the content and paste into the composing box of the webpage.

Here is a POST I posted on a CANVAS Page of my course (Real Analysis 1).

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We know that in Gmail, we can compose math formulas via LaTeX, provided you have installed the “TeX for Gmail” addon in Chrome. How to send emails containing math formula from an arbitrary email account (such as sliu@fit.edu)? I have an idea.

1. Login Gmail in Chrome, after filling your non-Gmail email address (such as sliu@fit.edu, in my case) from which you want to send the email, move to the area for composing the text of your email and press Shift + F8 button (or press the “TeX” button near the “Send” button in Gmail for other options). Now you can compose your email using LaTeX code. When you complete a pair of $ or $$, the codes will be converted into math formula automatically, as demonstrated below:

   

   

2. When you have composed the email, press the Send button sending this email to the non-Gmail email address (for example sliu@fit.edu, as shown above). Then, login to that email account, forward the email to the desired recipient (maybe you need to delete “Fw” in the Subject line, and other redundant information at the beginning of the email). The recipient will receive your email containing beautiful math formulas.

   The following figure shows the email with math formulas received by the third party (the desired recipient). You can see that it was sent from sliu@fit.edu, not from Gmail.

   

3. When receiving the email, your recipient can select the text (including the math formulas and symbols) and copy + paste to a TXT editor. The LaTeX codes of the math will be recovered (without the $ or $$, which have to be added manually). This is another advantage of this method.

4. Some email services (such as iCloud of Apple) do not support displaying the picture of the formulas. If your recipient use this kind of email address, instead of pressing Shift + F8, you should press Shift + F9 to use the “Simple math” mode, which can be supported in all known email service with poorer quality:

   Composing the email in Gmail (with Shift + F9), that will be sent to Apple iCloud email address:

   

   The email received in Apple iCloud email:

   

5. You can press the “TeX” button near the “Send” button in Gmail to see what options are available.