# Archimedes App

Archimedes is a nifty Markdown editor that supports writing math in LaTeX quickly and has an integrated preview window for viewing LaTeX. It also is specifically set up to make entering LaTeX easy. Some examples of this easy of entering LaTeX: 1) after you type $$ to indicate that you want to enter a Math expression, Archimedes auto-completes the closing two $$, and then moves your cursor in the middle of the two sets of  so you can begin typing. 2) If you start typing a couple of characters of something like \frac{}{} in order to set up a fraction, it will try to figure out what you’re typing, and you can hit enter to autocomplete the top guess. 3) For something like \frac{}{}, after hitting enter to select that as the expression you want to auto-complete, it will automatically select the numerator part so that you can begin typing there, and then when you’re done, you can TAB to the denominator part, and then when you’re done with that you can TAB a couple of times to get out of the whole expression.

So anyways I’ve been playing with Archimedes a bit. I have been working on a math book, and am trying to figure out the best way to take notes. I like Ulysses a lot, because I find it has various features (robust support for images, nice outline view, good publishing support) that I like. The LaTeX support is a bit iffy imho, especially for how I’ve been using it, because you’ve got to refer to an external resource in order to get LaTeX working in preview, and IME, Ulysses seems to refresh the preview window each time you make a change in the editor, so it’s kind of annoying to . One thing I have been trying out is writing out expressions in Archimedes and then pasting images from that into Ulysses. Below is an example of what that looks like with Exercise 2.39 from the Art of Problem Solving series book Introduction to Algebra. The first, lower res image is from the book, but the very bottom part (the part with just the actual expression in a nice-looking format) is actually an image I pasted from Archimedes’ preview mode. I think it looks quite nice and works quite well. One thing I like about pasting images into Ulysses instead of using LaTeX directly in Ulysses is that it makes the math expressions in the Ulysses editor more human readable - instead of being weird LaTeX stuff it’s just the actual formula. Also, if I wanted to send newsletters with math stuff in them using Ghost’s newsletter feature, this system would actually work (whereas LaTeX expressions entered directly into Ulysses will work on my website but not in the newsletter).

The 8r - 56 can be broken down into 8(r - 7), and then the r - 7 factored out, and then we can reverse the expressions and factor a 2 out of the (2r + 8) as well (I reversed the expressions in the final line).