Joannes Vermorel's blog

Google sites is a great product to increase productivity of businesses of any size. At Lokad, one feature that I am really missing from Google Sites is the ability the embed clean mathematical formula in regular web pages.

Actually, a simple and yet very practical way of achieving a decent mathematical display consists of using a JavaScript ASCII Maths to MathML converter. Yet, Google Sites does not support direct 3rd party script inclusion either (which is probably on of the most painful limitation of Google Sites, but I digress).

Thus, I have decided to spend some time toying with the Google Gadgets to figure out if it was possible to circumvent this limitation through widgets. The resulting gadget can be found here. See also the screenshot below.

The syntax is identical the one of AsciiMathML. Enjoy.

Known limitations:

• Works poorly with Internet Explorer. Since MathML is not natively supported, you need a MathML addon (it's free though).


• Gadget preferences can't be changed in syndicated environment such as Google Sites. Which means that you have to edit first the page in Google Sites if you want the change made to the gadget to be persistent.