What happened to the vB codes?

[Doc Al]

What happened to the vB codes? Like Δ and θ ?
It looks like these no longer work since the upgrade. Is this temporary, or are we not supposed to use them any more?

 

[jeff]

I hope this feature will be returning since it takes much longer to process tex and the maximum number of characters allowed in messages using lot's of it is about 2,500 characters as opposed to the normal 10,000. I use tex only when necessary.

 

[Chen]

Well, &Delta and the ilk are not really vB codes, they are HTML entities. The new version of vBulletin turns & into &, only God knows why. You would need to hack the vB files to undo this.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

What happened to the vB codes? Like Δ and θ ?
It looks like these no longer work since the upgrade. Is this temporary, or are we not supposed to use them any more?

No need for vb codes when you have LaTeX support

 

[Chen]

Hey Greg, who do I have to sleep with around here in order to get a custom avatar?

 

[jeff]

No need for vb codes when you have LaTeX support

As I said, unlike unicode, latex is really slow and cut's down the maximum size of posts by about 75% (and probably hurts performance of the site). I therefore avoid using tex when possible.

 

[chroot]

Hmmm I'd like to see them back also. The full power of TeX is honestly not always necessary. The *only* downside to the HTML codes is that some browsers do not display them properly, while all browsers will display the TeX properly.

We also don't really need 10,000 images in our latex directory of single greek letters...

- Warren

 

[chroot]

Okay, I re-enabled ASCII entities of the form &...;

Enjoy!

θ Δ

- Warren

 

[jeff]

Okay, I re-enabled ASCII entities of the form &...;

Enjoy!

? ?

- Warren

Thanks, I will!

 

[Doc Al]

Okay, I re-enabled ASCII entities of the form &...;

Sweet!

Now can you (or anyone) please post a list of all these entities? (Or a link to a list?)

Thanks!

 

[chroot]

*shrug* I'll see if I can find one somewhere...

 

[Hurkyl]

We also don't really need 10,000 images in our latex directory of single greek letters...

Do you need 10,000 copies of the image? Is it not feasible to hash LaTeX source to images to cut down on processing and storage?

 

[chroot]

Do you need 10,000 copies of the image? Is it not feasible to hash LaTeX source to images to cut down on processing and storage?

I've thought about doing hashing on the source, but the images are small to begin with. The possibility of hash collisions would mean I'd have to actually check them bit-by-bit to see if they're the same, which would mean I'd have to actually generate the image anyway. It wouldn't cut down on the server load at all. As far as I know, we have -plenty- of disk space to play with anyway. I'd also have to create a database to store the hashes. All in all, it's a lot of work to save a few megabytes, IMO.

My opinion on the matter is that LaTeX is overkill in many situations, so it just shouldn't be used there.

- Warren

 

[Doc Al]

I got codes

*shrug* I'll see if I can find one somewhere...

I found a motherload of them here: http://hissa.nist.gov/~black/htmlQuikRef.html

(Once I knew what they were called--not vB codes! --they were easy to find.)

Maybe it would be a good thing to list these codes in a sticky next to the Latex sticky.

Admin edit: yep, something is wrong with the URL quoting. Argh.