Latex in Octopress


Posted

Many of the topics I work with involve math left, right, and center. Being able to use $$\LaTeX$$ is a big feature for me so here’s the solution I’ve come up with so far. Credit certainly goes to Dr Zac and Felix for their work getting Latex playing nice. I believe that Zac’s is the more correct solution given its use of the custom header file rather than modifying the default layout. However Felix has the fix for a bug in MathJax which otherwise turns the entire page white when viewing an equation’s source.

The first step is to change the Markdown processor to be kramdown (or pandoc if you prefer, see Dr Zac’s page) as it supports Latex.

  • In Gemfile replace rdiscount with kramdown and remove the version requirement.
  • In _config.yml replace rdiscount with kramdown as the markdown parser
  • Run bundle install to install Kramdown if necessary.

Now add the MathJax script to each page’s header

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<!--- MathJax Configuration -->
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML">
</script>

Finally fix the MathJax right click bug if necessary. I’m using the readify theme which doesn’t trigger the bug, however the default theme does.

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body {
  > div {
    background: $sidebar-bg $noise-bg;

needs to be changed to

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body {
  > div#main {
    background: $sidebar-bg $noise-bg;

And the result, an attractive Fourier Transform equation

$$ F(\omega) = \int_{-\infty}^\infty f(t) e^{-i \omega t} dt. $$