Configure Your Own LaTeX Server

LaTeX is processed ‘off device’. By default, this means that your LaTeX snippets are sent (securely) over the internet to my server where they are converted into images and returned to your device. This means I can see your LaTeX (but not the rest of your map.) I don’t store or share your LaTeX snippets.

Obviously this is a bit of a privacy issue - so you can configure the application to use a different server.

NB: My server does not support non-ascii character sets (Chinese etc) within the LaTex - so this is another reason you might want to build your own.

The Server:

You need to configure a server that accepts two parameters via an HTTP(S) GET request:

• The LaTeX snippet

• The scale to apply to the resultant image

It should then return a PNG image of the LaTeX.

It is beyond the scope of this article to explain how to build a web server enabled for LaTeX processing (Google is your friend :-)

The Client:

You will need to configure iThoughts to use the URL for your server. This can be done in the Preferences (on Mac) or the System Settings (on iOS) or in the Help->Settings menu (on Windows.)

An example URL might looks like the following:

https://myserver.com/latex.php?latex=%TEX%&scale=%SCALE%

The %TEX% and %SCALE% will be replaced by the actual snippet and scale required when the app makes a request from the server.