CodeCogs® | Equation Editor
:: Table of Contents
FxEditor
User guideQuickstartDeploymentAPIDesign
FxTeX
APIExamplesRight-click menuAccessibility
FxTeX Server
OverviewAPIAccess and keysSelf-hosting
Plugins
OverviewCKEditor 5TinyMCE 6 and 7BloggerAngularFroalaTiptapWordPressMoodleGoogle Docs and SlidesCanvas, Blackboard and LTI
TiddlyWikiWriting your own
Licensing
How licensing works

Canvas, Blackboard and LTI

Learning platforms share a standard for plugging in tools: LTI 1.3. The fxEditor LTI tool is one small server that, once registered with a platform, appears in its content picker — Insert from App, External Tool and the like. An instructor opens it, writes the equation, presses Insert, and the equation is placed into the page they were editing as an image.

One deployment serves every platform you register it with: Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace (D2L), Schoology, Moodle, or any other LTI 1.3 platform.

Preview. The tool is built on ltijs, a maintained LTI 1.3 implementation, but has not yet been launched from each platform in production. If you would like to be among the first, contact us; we can also host it for you.

Running it yourself

It is a Node.js server, and needs a MongoDB database for LTI's platform and session records, and a public HTTPS address — platforms show LTI tools in a frame, which must be secure.

npm install
cp .env.example .env                        # then set MONGO_URL and EQNEDITOR_LICENCE
cp platforms.example.json platforms.json    # then add each platform you register with
npm start
MONGO_URLThe MongoDB connection string. Required.
EQNEDITOR_LICENCEYour fxEditor licence key. Required.
PORTPort to listen on. Default 3000.
EQNEDITOR_SERVERHost the equation editor is loaded from: fxeditor.codecogs.com.
EQNEDITOR_RENDER_URLThe fxTeX Server that draws the inserted images: https://fxtex.codecogs.com, or your own.
PLATFORMS_FILE / PLATFORMS_JSONWhere the platform registrations are read from, as a file or inline JSON.

Registering with a platform

Each platform issues its own client ID and endpoints when you register a tool with it; those go into platforms.json.

Canvas — Admin → Developer Keys → + LTI Key.

Blackboard — register an LTI 1.3 application on the Blackboard developer portal.

Brightspace — Admin Tools → External Learning Tools → LTI Advantage → Register Tool.

Schoology — App Center, LTI 1.3 registration.

Moodle — Site administration → Plugins → External tool → Manage tools. For equations in Moodle's own text editor, the Moodle plugin is the more direct route.

Why an image

LTI hands content back to a platform as HTML, and platforms have no common form for mathematics beyond that. An <img> drawn by fxTeX Server, with the LaTeX as its alt text, is the form every platform displays.

Copied to clipboard