How can I mix LaTeX in with Markdown

Question

I ve been using Markdown for class notes  and it s great   I even do some preprocessing on the Markdown so I can do things like tables   But this term I m teaching a class with a lot of math  and I d love to be able to put LaTeX formulas with Markdown  something like this   The refinement relation is written  a  sqsubseteq b   which can be  pronounced   a  approximates  b   or   b  is at least as defined as  a      I d like to be able to take each fragment of LaTeX and preprocess it into a nice antialiased PNG file which I could then include in my Markdown via the HTML  lt img gt  tag   But I have absolutely no idea how to take a fragment of LaTeX and get a nice image that   Has the right bounding box Is antialiased   All I know how to do is get full pages in DVI  PostScript  or PDF formats   I m sure this problem has been addressed  but I haven t been able to guess the right search terms   Any suggestions how to solve it or where to look for an existing solution     EDIT  Having installed mathTeX  I can say that the code is inflexible  that it violates the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy standard  and that it is amateur work mdash in both the good and bad senses of that word   The code is so complex that there are no obvious faults   I will be looking for alternatives   Also  it s clear that at bottom  solutions are based on dvipng     ONE YEAR LATER  I never did get the seamless integration I had been hoping for  but I am limping along on a script of my own devising   It turns out that instead of dvipng it is a little easier to use dvips -E and the convert program of ImageMagick   The benefits are slightly more control of things like scaling  and ease of making a transparent background  The curious can inspect this example     I can t recommend this solution to anyone   But I can t recommend MathTeX either

User · Answer

Add the following code to the top of your Markdown files to get MathJax rendering support

<style TYPE="text/css">
code.has-jax {font: inherit; font-size: 100%; background: inherit; border: inherit;}
</style>
<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">
MathJax.Hub.Config({
    tex2jax: {
        inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']],
        skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre'] // removed 'code' entry
    }
});
MathJax.Hub.Queue(function() {
    var all = MathJax.Hub.getAllJax(), i;
    for(i = 0; i < all.length; i += 1) {
        all[i].SourceElement().parentNode.className += ' has-jax';
    }
});
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.4/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full"></script>

and then `$x^2$` or `$$x^2$$` will render as expected :-)

You can always install a local version of MathJax if you don't want to use the online distribution, but you might need to host it through a local webserver.

UPDATE: these days I just use pandoc instead of canonical markdown, but the above is still useful.

User · Answer

I ll answer your question with a counter-question     What do you think of Org-mode   It s not as pure as Markdown  but it is Markdown-like  and I find it as easy to work with  and it allows embedding of Latex   Cf  http   www gnu org software emacs manual html node org Embedded-LaTeX html  Postscript  In case you haven t looked at org-mode  it has one great strength as a general purpose  natural markup language  over Markdown  namely its treatment of tables   The source      1   0   0     -1   1   0     -1   -1   1     represents just what you think it will     And the Latex is rendered in pieces using tex-mode s preview-latex

User · Answer

you should look at multimarkdown http   fletcherpenney net multimarkdown   it has support for metadata  headers  keywords  date  author  etc   tables  asciimath  mathml  hell i m sure you could stick latex math code right in there  it s basically an extension to markdown to add all these other very useful features  It uses XSLT  so you can easily whip up your own LaTeX styles  and have it directly convert  I use it all the time  and I like it a lot    I wish the markdown would just incorporate multimarkdown  it would be rather nice   Edit  Multimarkdown will produce html  latex  and a few other formats  html can come  with a style sheet of your choice  it will convert into MathML as well  which displays in Firefox and Safari Chrome  if I remember correctly

User · Answer

RStudio has a good free IDE that allows for Markdown and LaTeX

User · Answer

Have you tried with Pandoc   EDIT  Although the documentation has become a bit complex  pandoc has supported inline LaTeX and LaTeX templates for 10 years  Documents like the following one can be written in Markdown  --- title  Just say hello  author  My Friend header-includes         usepackage tikz pgfplots       usepackage fancyhdr       pagestyle fancy       fancyhead CO CE  This is fancy       fancyfoot CO CE  So is this       fancyfoot LE RO   thepage  abstract  This is a pandoc test with Markdown   inline LaTeX ---  Just say hello                   This could be a good example or inlined  LaTeX    begin tikzpicture   begin axis   addplot color red  exp x     end axis   end tikzpicture   Here ends the furst plot  hskip 5pt  Here begins the 3d plot  begin tikzpicture   begin axis   addplot3      surf     exp -x 2-y 2  x    end axis   end tikzpicture   And now  just a few words to terminate    gt  Goodbye folks   Which can be converted to LaTeX using commands like this  pandoc -s -i Hello md -o Hello tex Following is an image of the converted Hello md to Hello pdf file using MiKTeX as LaTeX processor with the command  pandoc -s -i Hello md -o Hello pdf  Finally  there are some open source LaTeX templates like this one  https   github com Wandmalfarbe pandoc-latex-template  that can be used for better formatting  As always  the reader should dig deeper if he has less trivial use cases than presented here

User · Answer

yes  but you ll have to hack it a little yourself  I ve written a filter that replaces latex tags   some inline latex  or    some equation   with appropriate image tags to a mimetex cgi script  It took all of 5 minutes   Warning  spectacularly ugly        usr bin env python import sys  markdown re  MIMETEX LOC  http   some server com cgi-bin mimetex cgi   def sanitizeLatex text       return re sub r     r  5C   text   def wrapLatexBlock text       return   lt img alt  equation  class  block  src   s  s  gt  lt  img gt    MIMETEX LOC text   def wrapLatexInline text       return   lt img alt  equation  class  inline  src   s  s  gt  lt  img gt    MIMETEX LOC text   def prepLatexBlock matchobj       return wrapLatexBlock sanitizeLatex matchobj group   2 -2     def prepLatexInline matchobj       return wrapLatexInline sanitizeLatex matchobj group   1 -1      if   name         main           initialise markdown     md markdown Markdown       raw md open sys argv 1   r   read                 deal with embedded latex            raw md re sub r                prepLatexBlock  raw md      raw md re sub r            prepLatexInline  raw md                once latex is parsed  convert md to html            main html md convert raw md         hey presto      print main html    Of course  you have to define the appropriate css yourself for  block and  inline images

User · Answer

Sorry to rouse a really old thread  but I ve been using jemdoc for a couple of years and it is really excellent

User · Answer

Perhaps mathJAX is the ticket   It s built on jsMath  a 2004 vintage JavaScript library   As of 5-Feb-2015 I d switch to recommend KaTeX - most performant Javascript LaTeX library from Khan Academy

User · Answer

Hey  this might not be the most ideal solution  but it works for me  I ended up creating a Python-Markdown LaTeX extension   https   github com justinvh Markdown-LaTeX  It adds support for inline math and text expressions using a  math  and  text  syntax  The extension is a preprocessor that will use latex dvipng to generate pngs for the respective equations text and then base64 encode the data to inline the images directly  rather than have external images   The data is then put in a simple-delimited cache file that encodes the expression to the base64 representation  This limits the number of times latex actually has to be run   Here is an example    Hello  world   This is regular text  but this   y   mx   b  is not    The output     markdown -x latex test markdown  lt p gt  lt img class  latex-inline math-false  alt  Hello  world   id  Helloworld  src  data image png base64 iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAFwAAAAQBAMAAABpWwV8AAAAMFBMVEX   8iIiK6urpUVFTu7u6YmJgQEBDc3NxERESqqqqIiIgyMjJ2dnZmZmbMzMwAAAAbX03YAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAAVpJREFUKM9jYICDOgb2BwzYAVji8AQg8fb PZ79u4AMvv0Mrz gUA6W8F7AmcLAsJuBYT7Y1PcMfLiUgyWYF B8Z2DYAVReABKrZ2DHpZwdopzrA0nKOeHKj66CKOcKPQJWwJo2NVFhfwCQyymhYwCUYD0avIApgYFh2927 QUcE3gDwMpvMhRCDJzNMIPhKZg7UW8DUOIMg9sCPgGo6e8ZODeAlAP9xLEArNy IIwhAMx9D3IM 3cgi70BqnxZaNQFkHJWAQbeBrByjgURExaAuc9AyjnB5hjAlEO9ygVXzrplpskEMPchQvkBmGMcGApgjjkAVs7yhyWVAcwFK2f AlJeAI0m5gMsEK aMhQ6aDuA1DcDIZirBg7IOwxlB5g2QBJBF8OZVUz95hqfC3hOXWGYrwBSHskwk4EByGXab8QAlOBaGizFKYAtUlgUGEgBTCSpZnDCLQUA y6MXeYnPDgAAAAASUVORK5CYII   gt  This is regular text  but this   lt img class  latex-inline math-true  alt  y   mx   b  id  ymxb  src  data image png base64 iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAFIAAAAOBAMAAABOTlYkAAAAMFBMVEX   9ERETu7u4yMjK6urp2dnZUVFSIiIjMzMwQEBDc3NwiIiJmZmaYmJiqqqoAAADS00rKAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAAOtJREFUKM9jYCAACsCk4wYGgiABTLInEKuS QGxKvkVGBj47jBwI8tcffI84e45BoZ7GVcLECo9751iWLeSoRPITBQEggMMDBy9sxj2MDgz8DIE8yCpPMxwjWFBGUMMkpFcbAEMvxjKGLgYxIE8NkHBiYIyQMY hmoGhi0Mdsi2czawbGCQBTJ ILvzE0MaA9MHIIWwnWE9A sBpk8LGDgmMCnAVXJNYPgCJHhRQvUiA cDXoECZx4DXoSZTBtYgaaEPw5AVnkOGBRc5xTcbsReQrL9 nWwyxbgC88DcJZ QygDcYD1 QPiFAIAtLA8KPZOGFEAAAAASUVORK5CYII   gt  is not  lt  p gt    As you can see it is a verbose output  but that really isn t an issue since you re already using Markdown

User · Answer

kramdown does exactly what you describe   https   kramdown gettalong org syntax html math-blocks  And it s way more reliable and well-defined than Markdown

User · Answer

I was looking for exactly the same thing when I found teqhtml  It does the conversion of   and    equations to images with the nice bonus of aligning the resulting image vertically with the surrounding text  Not a lot of doc but it s quite straightforward   Hope it helps some future readers

User · Answer

What language are you using   If you can use ruby  then maruku can be configured to process maths using various latex- MathML converters   Instiki uses this   It s also possible to extend PHPMarkdown to use itex2MML as well to convert maths   Basically  you insert extra steps in the Markdown engine at the appropriate points   So with ruby and PHP  this is done   I guess these solutions could also be adapted to other languages - I ve gotten the itex2MML extension to produce perl bindings as well

User · Answer

You might find mimeTeX useful

User · Answer

It is possible to parse Markdown in Lua using the Lunamark code  see its Github repo   meaning that Markdown may be parsed directly by macros in Luatex and supports conversion to many of the formats supported by Pandoc  i e   the library is well-suited to use in lualatex  context  Metafun  Plain Luatex  and texlua scripts     The project was started by John MacFarlane  author of Pandoc  and the tool s development tracks that of Pandoc quite closely and is of similar  i e   excellent  quality   Khaled Hosny wrote a Context module  providing convenient macro support    Michal s answer to the Is there any package with Markdown support  question gives code providing similar support for Latex

User · Answer

I came across this discussion only now  so I hope my comment is still useful  I am involved with MathJax and  from how I understand your situation  I think that it would be a good way to solve the problem  you leave your LaTeX code as is  and let MathJax render the mathematics upon viewing   Is there any reason why you would prefer images

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