I’ve now uploaded a plugin for LaTeX support to the plugin page here at bbPress.
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bblatex/
I’ve had a go at adapting one of the WordPress plugins (easy LaTeX) for bbPress. It works for me, but there are probably a few things a little too specific to my set-up for it to be released “in the wild” – for example, I’m using both WordPress and bbPress so there’s a little cross-over information which wouldn’t be available on a bbPress-only site (putting in some options for that would probably be a good idea).
However, it might be suitable for beta-testing. I’ve put a copy here if anyone’s interested in taking a look and tweaking it.
A few details:
It uses a public server so no need for LaTeX to be installed locally.
It uses a cache (needs to be writable by the server) to save on server load.
It has a two-step parsing (not in the original) since forum posts are saved in their original format. This makes it more robust since the plugin allows for changing the tags that surround the mathematics. The saved format uses <math> tags which has the added advantage of avoiding markdown processing.
Due to being a rather limited programmer, I ended up copying stuff from other plugins to get it to work without really understanding what I was doing (particularly with add_filter and the like) so if some kind soul wishes to take pity on me and clean up my code I’d be very grateful.
