Is it possible to add buttons to the chat window, specifically the DragMath button? If so, how can this be done?
Best,
agd
Hi Marc,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I realize it's not a display technology, but I'd like to give students the ability to generate a mathematical expression's corresponding latex so they can "easily" enter complex mathematical notation when chatting. This ability would be useful for some of my physics classes and I know it would be most useful for the mathematics teachers at my school.
I will search for this information about asciimath (and post back here if I find it), but if you run across it first, I'd greatly appreciate the information.
Again, thank you.
If you want to use default editor, HTMLArea with latest Dragmath installed to your site you need to modify two files (index.php and chatinput.php) in folder mod/chat/gui_header_js that replace input field with textarea that moodle can replace with editor using functions print_textarea and use_html_editor (you can also select which buttons you want to hide from editor)
Check those files from attached zip file (I tested this quickly so code may not be optimal...)
And it looks like this with tex filter enabled:
(you could also replace selected textarea with tinymce and in fact with one button in toolbar but I suppose you want to use HTMLArea here...)
Marc and Mauno,
Thank you so much. I replaced the index.php and chatinput.php files and it works like a charm!
Best,
agd
Hi Marc,
Thanks for the Lipmann link--very nice. That is ideally what I would love to see in a math chat application.
I am very new to Moodle, but it is growing on me. I feel that more math/physics teachers (where I am at least) would warm up to Moodle too if Moodle's mathematical functionality were expanded.
When you say, 'add a section to the dragmath docs under developments', do you mean http://docs.moodle.org/en/Talk:DragMath_equation_editor?
I will add mention of this discussion in the forum you link to at the bottom of the above link and also create a tracker when I can.
Thanks again.
agd
Marc and Mauno,
Yes, I'm very interested in seeing the math features of David's app incorporated into Moodle chat. I would be willing to help out in whatever capacity I'm able.
I've come across discussions about tinyMCE vs. htmlArea. Would you recommend that I switch over to tinyMCE?
Thanks.
anthony
In moodle 1.9 no current integration of TinyMCE is fully functional but we have plenty of choices here. It is possible to use tinymce for example in some particular theme so that you disable default editor first (for example in theme config.php) and then use a certain class to render tinymce only for that class (textarea). But we can use the same idea in this particular module or in a clone of chat module (let's say "tinychat" or "mathchat") so that we don't need to modify the core code of moodle at all. In moodle 2.0 it will be possible to use default editor directly with some extra code or for example to use another parallel version of tinymce ("advanced math editor") again without modifying the core code.
This MathChat was a good, new idea - I saw the original post from David Lippman in google group for asciimath when David posted it but never thought we could actually use the idea in chat module of moodle as well.
Do you think it's better to create a new MathChat module with TinyMCE or to modify current code of chat module?