LaTeX rendering#1

Option to write content in LaTeX

I thought it was in “planned” status some time ago, is it the same priority now?

It would be great to be able to write LaTeX equations in the Markdown editor, and have them rendered server-side using KaTeX. This prevents users from needing to run KaTeX’s JavaScript on every page.

A suggestion for math rendering: Let Bear blog Markdown recognize math between $…$ delimiters and convert it to MathML.

MathML is now supported by all three of the major browser engines. You can use a system font for math; that will minimize the page size. A LaTeX-to-MathML conversion library (like my Temml) enables you to do a server-side conversion and avoid JavaScript in the browser. Temml’s CSS can be minified to about 4kb.

MathML renders in high quality in Firefox. Chromium is about 95% reliable. Webkit, not so much. Which means that neither Chromium nor Webkit are currently up to Bear-blog quality standards, so you may want to monitor the situation for a year or so before acting. But I believe that MathML will be the long-term minimalist solution.

MathML looks like a good option. Will look into it

It looks like there is good support for MathML. Thanks for the suggestion. I have it converting all content between $$ from Latex to MathML. I’ve updated the docs about it as well: https://docs.bearblog.dev/mathematical-notation/

Please log any bugs as GitHub issues or email me

Support for math! Congratulations!

Small point regarding math delimiters: There is no general consensus, but GitHub, StackOverflow, and Pandoc all use $…$ for inline math. Following their example would align you with the web’s biggest consumers of math notation.

Pandoc adds a condition that the opening $ must have a non-space character immediately to its right, while the closing $ must have a non-space character immediately to its left and must not be followed immediately by a digit. Thus, $20,000 and $30,000 won’t parse as math.

The choice of delimiters is a small matter. The big news is that you now support math. If you choose to stick with $$…$$, that is a perfectly valid choice.

I was following the style UpMath uses with sticking with $$ universally, but used linebreaks to represent blocks vs inlines. I think I’m going to stick with this format since it reduces the chance of me missing a corner case and someone writing about money casually creating a math block. Eg:

I made $20 last week. I really like making $ because it's neat.