The nano.org project is currently in early beta testing - however topics discussed below are already in effect. Read more about the beta test here.

A previous help page covered the basics of posting a purely textual contribution into a discussion thread. This page explains how to create more advanced posts, including symbolic equations.

One way to put equations into your posts would be to regard the equation as a graphical image. You could create the equation in some other piece of software, for example Microsoft Word's Equation Editor or Mathematica, and then save or copy it as an image. Then of course this image can be uploaded to nano.org just like any other picture.

However, nano.org implements a second mechanism which is based on the LaTeX syntax for writing equations. The tags [eqn] and [/eqn] are used to mark the beginning and end of a LaTeX equation (just as [b] and [/b] are used to indicate that a piece should apear bold). Many users will already be familiar with LaTeX, as it is commonly used by researchers in mathematics and the physical sciences to compose research papers. It is a powerful tool capable of generating extremely sophisticated expressions - many introductions to LaTeX exist on the internet. The summary provided by Wikipedia to its users contains an excellent set of tables summarizing LaTeX equations (but note that their users delimit equations using <math> rather than nano.org's [eqn] markers). The figure below is a screen shot of the posting process containing some useful examples. Further below is the resulting post.