@MaartenBodewes There are ways of left-aligning MathJax blocks, but I believe that is a setting within MathJax, which is controllable on the server side (and is not really user accessible).

You can kind of fake it, I guess, with an align environment and a lot of horizontal space, but that won't work well when the column is resized (for example).

@XanderHenderson Ah, yeah, I was kind of afraid of that. I was converting some images but these kind formulas are almost impossible to get back. Now I've done it line-by-line using single dollar signs, but yeah. Do you have a specific way to convert from posted images in questions or are you all Latex experts?

@MaartenBodewes I convert images by typing them up...?

I guess I am not sure what you are asking.

These question askers that simply take a screenshot of a PDF and put it into their question

I generally try and convert that back into text & formulas.

Actually I created a GPT that does this for me, but the mods asked me to avoid ChatGPT.

@MaartenBodewes Oh, we generally close those and make the asker type it up.

@XanderHenderson Huh, I guess you can do that for the math inclined.

We have a whole meta thread about it.

Yeah, we have something like that too, a bit more targeted at cryptographers, e.g. here and there is of course more.

4K points eh? Different amount of traffic for sure :)

Heh.

Anyway, if you want to see some examples for the GPT just ask. I can link to it. You just upload a screenshot and perfectly good MD + MathJax comes out. I won't say it is perfect, but it is amazing what it can do.

@MaartenBodewes I've seen some of what GPT can do with LaTeX. It's... fine.

The only thing I cannot get it to do consistently is to use $ instead of (. That's driving me nuts.

But good LaTeX should encode semantics, not formatting.

And I am not convinced that any of the automatic systems do a good job of that.

It is like the HTML editors I was once asked to use in the the early 2000s. So much extra crap. Better to just do it by hand.

For sure, but generally it doesn't go overboard with the formatting at least.

Yeah, I did some HTML too back in the days.

Actually when I was studying CS a lot of students got offers to work at websites for companies.

(I've missed so many opportunities to get rich, but then again, never my goal)

But I guess you want to do Latex with \newcommand and stuff, and generally it won't do that.

Hey SAAD with the Unicode A's.

@MaartenBodewes You can do that in MathJax.

And they even fixed most of the scoping bugs.

(on SE)

Yeah, haven't run into many lately.

To the point that the problem has disappeared. Then again, lots of people just use \text on the crypto site. Probably sacrilegious here :P

Don't anger the math gods and such.

(and yes, I know it can do more than display the text differently)

@MaartenBodewes After reading the doc for MathJax 2.7, it can be achieved like this: $\style{margin-right: 100%}{\begin{align*} a &= b + 1 \\ c &= ab + a + bab \end{align*}}$

With double $$ signs? Because otherwise it is already positioned to the left, right?

No, in fact it cannot be within double dollars. This method permits the usual alignment and line-breaking for math blocks.

Yeah, I'm afraid that the $$ problem is that it is not centered by the Latex, as Xander mentioned it can be done, but by configuring MathJax, no doubt changing the CSS.

It's more left-ish though, I give you that :)

Never mind, newer MathJax natively supports the flalign environment according to the doc. Hopefully the version used on Math SE would be updated in the future :/

Well, if it does then give me a shout because we would be interested in that as well. Although I'd assume that they will try to use the same version on most sites.

Anyway, It's getting waaaay to late, I'm at CET. Thanks for the info and the ideas!

Yeah, I looked at that, but I think it comes down to left-align by using MathJax configuration, right?

I've mentioned the above conversation in the MathJax chatroom - but I doubt that something can be added to the things mentioned above.