LaTeX Support

LaTeX is an great tool, especially useful for the typesetting of complex mathematical formulas. Mathjax allows page authors to write formulas using LaTeX notation.

Use MathJax for Jekyll

To implement Mathjax, you need to customize your theme’s html layout. To do so:

On GitHub, navigate to your theme’s source repository. At the Campbell Muscle Lab, we use just-the-docs.
In the _layouts folder, navigate to your theme’s default.html file.
Copy the contents of the file.
On GitHub, navigate to your site’s repository, where the _config.yml file is located.
Create a file called _layouts/default.html.
Paste the default layout content you copied earlier.
Customize the layout by adding this code:

<script type="text/x-mathjax-config"> MathJax.Hub.Config({ TeX: { equationNumbers: { autoNumber: "none" } } }); </script> 

<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">
MathJax.Hub.Config({
  tex2jax: {
	inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']],
	displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'] ],
	processEscapes: true,
	processEnvironments: true
	}
}); 

An example

You can now insert LaTeX-like equations in your Markdown files. For instance, the following code:

There are two solutions to the quadratic equation $$a x^2 + b x + c = 0$$:

$$ x_{1,2} = \dfrac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} $$

will produce:

Latex equation

Tips

Some difficulties may arise when MathJax is used in content-management systems (like Markdown) that have their own document processing commands that are interpreted before the HTML page is created. For instance, the hash symbol # is interpreted by Markdown before LaTeX and thus can lead to a bad rendering of the equations. Here are a few tips to overcome some of these difficulties.

Use the \unicode{x23} command.

< or >

Use the \lt or \gt command.

Matrix

Use \\\ instead of \\ to create a new line in the matrix.