Video Transcript:

Welcome to this WP courseware tutorial video. My name is Nate Johnson and I'm one of the co-founders here at Fly Plugins, creators of WP courseware. And today we're going to be looking at a simple way that you can format complex mathematical equations within your WP Courseware quiz questions.

We're going to show you a really easy way to format these so that math just looks nice when you use it in WP Courseware. Now we're going to keep this video simple, but I do want to briefly describe the two components that we're going to be using to pull this off.

The first is called LaTeX and this is a high-quality typesetting system with features designed for the publication of technical and scientific projects. It's really just a markup language. You'll see that it's pretty simple, but we're going to use a web-based equation builder to help us out.

The next component we'll be using is called MathJax. This is a cross browser JavaScript library that displays mathematical notation in web browsers using markup such as LaTeX, which we're going to be using to produce our equations. And we're going to handle this by using a free WordPress plugin to render our equations within our quiz questions.

I just set up a basic WordPress installation with a basic theme and all I have installed so far is WP courseware. I've also created a new course with one unit in it and one quiz.

The first thing we're going to want to do is go to the Add New Plugin screen and search for MathJax. And you'll see this plugin come up in the middle here, Simple MathJax. We just want to go ahead and install and activate that. And now we can see that in here in our Installed Plugins panel. We don't actually need to do anything in the settings. We can just leave that plugin there for now.

Now we're going to go over to a web page where we can create our LaTeX formatted equation to put in our quiz. There are a number of these online LaTeX equation editors out there. The one that I typically use is at codecogs.com and I'll link to that in the notes for this video. But as you can see here, we have a full-on editor for our equation.

We can customize colors, add functions, we can customize our fonts, we can visually select from functions here, and as we choose these functions it's going to put the proper markup into the equation box that we can copy and paste into WordPress.

So I'm just going to go in and create a basic equation using fractions. Okay, I’ve built a pretty basic equation here multiplying two fractions. You can see I've used the markup for fractions in LaTeX here and also the operator for multiplication, which is backslash times and then I’ve placed the equals at the end.

Once you have your equations built in the LaTeX equation builder, you can simply copy this code. And back within our WP courseware quiz question we are going to paste that LaTeX markup within our question field here, enclosed by a dollar sign on both ends.

And we'll save our question. Now, let's refresh our quiz on the front end of our WP courseware-powered website. And as you can see, our LaTeX markup is rendered using the MathJax plugin. That’s all there is to it. I told you it was simple. I hope you found this video helpful. Thanks for watching.