Forums Instiki

Some questions

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rzarev 1 post

Hello,

I just started using Instiki a few days ago. First of all, let me say I think it is great, and I think it is a really good productivity tool. (I am using it as a personal notebook, rather than a public wiki, although I might do both at some point).

That said, I have run into a few problems/inconveniences so far. I’m not sure whether they qualify as bugs, feature requests, or just something I couldn’t figure out how to do, so I’m just going to ask them all here:

  • Is there a way to link to a category? My idea is to have a lot of categories, but only link to the most important ones from the homepage. I couldn’t figure out any way to do that.

  • Macros for iTex: Is there any way to define per-page or global macros?

  • Errors for iTex: So far it seems like if some TeX expression doesn’t work you just get the source rendered, but there is no way to find exactly where the error is. This way if I have a long equation I am left to hunt through the whole thing for the missed bracket or parenthesis. Is there something I’m missing?

  • Linking and/or embedding local files: I am running Instiki locally, but I am syncing the whole thing online, so I can use it from more than one computer. I often use Xournal (on a tablet PC) to take notes/do calculations. While for high-level results, or summaries, Instiki is fine, for long/messy calculations it’s a lot faster to just hand-write them in Xournal. Ideally, I want to be able to link to a Xournal file from Instiki and have some quick way of viewing or editing it. Right now it seems like that the only way is to put a file:/// url, but that requires syncing two things separately, and making sure the url’s make sense on every computer I am using.

  • Editing SVG graphics: This is something that I’m pretty sure is a bug. It seems like unless there is empty space before and after the svg tags, the “Edit SVG graphic” button doesn’t show up.

  • How can I adjust the way math is rendered? I am using Firefox 11 under Linux. All math is much smaller than the surrounding text (e.g. 0 is the height of a lower case letter). I imagine there is some CSS option to change the font size for math, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

I have some programing experience, though I haven’t used Ruby before. I am willing to try to add some of these features myself, if you can give me some pointers as to where to start.

 
distler Moderator 123 posts
  • Is there a way to link to a category? My idea is to have a lot of categories, but only link to the most important ones from the homepage. I couldn’t figure out any way to do that.

Not sure what you are after. Perhaps you mean to link to the page listing all pages in category ‘foo’. The url for that is /list/foo .

  • Macros for iTex: Is there any way to define per-page or global macros?

No. Though this is a much-discussed question.

  • Errors for iTex: So far it seems like if some TeX expression doesn’t work you just get the source rendered, but there is no way to find exactly where the error is. This way if I have a long equation I am left to hunt through the whole thing for the missed bracket or parenthesis. Is there something I’m missing?

I agree that itex’s error-reporting is pretty useless. Depending on the type of error (a missed brace bracket, say), LaTeX’s is often not much better. Here, at least, you know which equation to look at for the error, as each equation is parsed separately, and errors can’t spill over as they sometimes do in LaTeX.

  • Linking and/or embedding local files: I am running Instiki locally, but I am syncing the whole thing online, so I can use it from more than one computer. I often use Xournal (on a tablet PC) to take notes/do calculations. While for high-level results, or summaries, Instiki is fine, for long/messy calculations it’s a lot faster to just hand-write them in Xournal. Ideally, I want to be able to link to a Xournal file from Instiki and have some quick way of viewing or editing it. Right now it seems like that the only way is to put a file:/// url, but that requires syncing two things separately, and making sure the url’s make sense on every computer I am using.

Look at Instiki’s file upload capability.

That probably doesn’t help you very much from the point of view of syncing between different computers (as each Instiki installation will have its own set of uploaded files).

  • Editing SVG graphics: This is something that I’m pretty sure is a bug. It seems like unless there is empty space before and after the svg tags, the “Edit SVG graphic” button doesn’t show up.

I think it doesn’t like ”<svg” as the first characters on a page. But I have not had any trouble if the graphic is in the middle of the text.

  • How can I adjust the way math is rendered? I am using Firefox 11 under Linux. All math is much smaller than the surrounding text (e.g. 0 is the height of a lower case letter). I imagine there is some CSS option to change the font size for math, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

That’s strange. I am using Firefox on a Mac, and see no such inconsistency. Do you have the STIX fonts installed?

  • I have some programing experience, though I haven’t used Ruby before. I am willing to try to add some of these features myself, if you can give me some pointers as to where to start.

Contributions are always welcome. The source repository is available both through BZR and on Github.

Forums Instiki