latex2wp: a tool for converting LaTeX to WordPress-ready HTML

Migrating my blog from Blogger to WordPress turned out to be more trouble than I hoped, because WordPress requires a particular syntax for latex, and several hacks I used to make things display nicely on Blogger just garbled things in WordPress. No one thing was actually complicated to migrate, but taken all together it was just tedious.

I ended up using Luca Trevisan’s latex2wp tool, which converts basic latex into HTML ready to be cut and paste into WordPress. This is great because I can now write and store all blog posts in basic latex, and just change the tool as necessary in the future if I need to move site again, or if WordPress changes its syntax, or whatever.

Since I found the tool so useful I decided to put my own tweaked version on github. As additional features, I’ve added

• installation by pip,
• a simple commandline entrypoint,
• support for simple on-the-fly macros defined with \def.

And no doubt I will find myself adding more features as time goes on! Everything can be found at https://github.com/seaneberhard/latex2wp.

Rebooted blog

In a renewed effort to stay connected with the research community, I’ve decided to start maintaining my blog again. As step 1, I retired the old name “proof roof” (an homage to Erdős’s “another roof, another proof”) in favour of the new name “random permutations”, which is more personal, and a little less cartoonish.

I chose the new name for two reasons. First, a lot of my research has been about random permutations, or other properties of the symmetric group, so I guess as mathematical objects they must mean something to me. Second, it suggests that my blog covers the same ground repeatedly in different words, which I find funny.

As step 2 I migrated from Blogger to WordPress. My main reason for doing so is the $\LaTeX$-integration. For whatever reason, WordPress’s latex display seems to be cleaner and more robust.

I plan to use this revitalized platform mainly to post at random about whatever problems or conjectures I currently find interesting. I hope you find something interesting here, and if you do please comment! With some luck maybe we can combine ideas and prove something.