Solution to render math equations in Markdown
Step-by-step to render math equations in Markdown from $\rm\TeX$ source.
Procedure
To produce a post with lots of math formulas, I will take three steps:
- Write the post with $\rm\LaTeX$, we have the $\rm \TeX$ sources, and also can get a PDF file.
- Convert $\rm \TeX$ into Markdown with Pandoc:
pandoc mat.tex -s --mathjax -o mat.md
- Add or replace the front matter block (e.g. layout, title, category and tags) for the newly generated Markdown document.
Caveats
The rendering of math equations with MathJax is of high quality. However, $\rm\LaTeX$ contains too many syntax, and it’s really hard to translate it into the script supporting both the syntax of Jekyll and MathJax with no mistakes. To be accurate, some mistakes are made by Pandoc. Here, I will list several common problems I encountered and the associated remedies (maybe far from best):
- To render of the curly brackets: double backslashes before the bracket
- Display math looks a mess: adding line breakers before & after the formula
- To convert the algorithmatic and the table environments correctly: screenshot the algorithms, rebuild the table in Markdown
- Auto-generate references and citations from the provided .bib file: pandoc-citeproc library may be helpful, with –bibliogrphy parameter, it always reports exception