gayleard

Thanks for your reply.
I’m working my way through the list of plugins you pointed to,
but so far they all do far more than I want.

I have been keeping an impersonal diary –
mainly reminders to myself of how to do things –
for several years, using the standard Unix text editor vi.
The result is not elegant, but is easy to search through,
using grep.

Having gone over to WordPress for several weeks,
I find it much more time-consuming to make entries,
and am wondering now if it is worth pursuing this option.

The reason, incidentally, why I went over to WP
was that I have a number of computers which I use
at different times,
so a web-based system seemed worth looking into.

I am a mathematician, and use LaTeX quite a lot.
Surprisingly, I find writing LaTeX
much simpler than any WP editor I have tried.

It seems my needs are not those of the usual WP user.
I want above all to be able to make quick entries,
which will only invoke the simplest of HTML tags –
for example, I’d like a blank line to produce </p><p>.

I’d also like it to be as simple as possible
to cut-and-paste from items I read,
in newsgroups or email or on the web.

Maybe WordPress is not for me –
basically, I am not a blogger
but am simply looking for an easy way to make personal notes.

Anyway, I’ll go back to looking through the suggested plugins,
but as I said these all seem to be trying to make
various complicated tasks easy,
while I am looking for the opposite,
something to make trivial tasks trivial.

But I’d add this query – where does it say that the correct tags
for latexrender are [tex]…[/tex]?

And this just seems to me part of the documentation failure
which seriously mars WP in my eyes.

I don’t really understand how someone can develop
a difficult application like the latexrender plugin
without documenting it properly, or even at all.

I agree – as a newbie – that the present system is bad.
I was quite shocked when I looked at what I had written and saved.
I don’t know much HTML, but felt I had to learn something about it
to work out what the WP editor was doing.

I would have thought that imitating the basic TeX system
where 2 blank lines start a new paragraph
would be a good beginning.

Add is a slightly different problem.
I would have thought a simple tag would be a plausible answer.

In any case, I believe the editor tries to do far too much
at the moment, and I for one would prefer if it made less effort.

It may be an old scab – I’m a newbie.
Perhaps you can tell me the explanation
for this unbelievably bad search facility?

I don’t know if I am unusual,
but when an application (WordPress in this case)
has a bad feature like this,
it reflects on the application itself.

I’m not sure if I am talking about the same thing as the OP,
but I find the Search facility in the Support Forum
almost completely useless.
What exactly does it search for?
Is it just tags that people have given to their post?

￡g I was looking for advice on the latexrender plugin,
and searched for LaTeX, Latex and latex but found nothing.

Yes, the problem was not in fact with the tags at all,
but with the settings at the top of
…/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/latexrender/latex.php –
in particular, the setting of latexrender_path_http .

I had run the script install-latexrender.bash
which had reported that all was well,
but in fact I had given the link to …/wordpress
in my web-server a different name, as suggested IIRC
somewhere in the WordPress documentation,
and I had to modify latexrender_path_http accordingly.

I looked at Google Notebook (as suggested) but it doesn’t quite meet my needs, I think. As far as I can see, the Notebook is saved on Google’s server. I really want something that is saved on my own machine. (I’m running WordPress on my desktop, which is running httpd/Apache under Fedora-6.)

I’m still not sure if WordPress really meets my needs; I find it rather quirky, and the editor is not as user-friendly as it might be. However, this may just be a matter of getting used to it, and I shall persevere, at least for some time.

It would make a big difference to me if LatexRender worked for me. (LaTeX, for the person who asked, is the standard system for printing mathematics. I have seen LatexRender output in WordPress, and it looks very nice, but I have not worked out how one is meant to use the plugin (which I have installed and activated). For some reason the developer of the LatexRender plugin does not seem to have told anyone how to use it.

This is far from an answer to your query – just a very newbie question that you can probably answer.

You speak of “the WYSIWYG editor”, which seems to suggest that there are other editors than one can use. Is that so? And if so, where does one find and install such an editor?

My problem is that my WP editor seems to have lost its WYSIWYG character, and now shows <p>, </p> and other tags all over the place.

A further newbie question:
I googled for this plugin, and found a reference to <https://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/disable-wpautop&gt;.
However, I have no idea how to download or install this plugin.

I searched on this forum for “plugin installation”
but didn’t find anything very useful.

But surely there is a simple document somewhere
explaining how to do this kind of thing (install plugins).
Either WordPress documentation is bizarre in the extreme,
or I haven’t found the right place to look.