Can you copy paste MathJax? [duplicate]

Question

I am a big procrastinator when it comes to learning MathJax. I happened to remember that only before asking a question. Is there perhaps a shortcut to simply copy an equation from one part of the site and then edit according to our own question (hope this doesn't count as plagiarism for not doing the MathJax part), much like in desmos where you copy a part of an equation and then insert it somewhere else on the site.

Or maybe this feature might cause a headache, but is there a any better technique

Answer 1

For posts or comments on MathSE:

Right click on the formula and select Show Math As > TeX Commands

For external sites that use MathJax:

Try the same trick as above.

Otherwise use right click on the formula and select View Page source/ Inspect Element and copy from there.

For other external sites:

Unfortunately, websites like Wikipedia or Woltram mathworld embed formulae as images. However, we can use the methods suggested by Martin Sleziak and PedroSánchezTerraf in the comments:

Right click on the image and select View Source or Inspect Element. The math code can be seen in the alt text for the image, as shown in the screenshot.

You can also find it by clicking Edit for the article or section.

Where this does not work, one can use Mathpix to obtain the Tex commands from an OCR file.

The last resort, as always, is to look for the elsewhere or type it yourself!

Answer 2

As a coda to the existing answer/comments, let me mention a useful last resort. If there's a tex symbol you don't know, and the site you're looking at doesn't reveal its code in a useful way (or you're reading a physical text!), you can always try the site detexify. Of course this is limited, since latex doesn't exactly line up with mathjax, but it's still very useful to know about.