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MathJax with Markdownpad 2
with 5 comments

As I said before, Markdownpad 2 Rules. One thing that was missing was math markup of any kind. I take a lot of school notes and find myself wishing I could type out math notation instead of needing to resort to pen and paper. A post on the MarkdownPad 2 forums said using MathJax was a possibility so I looked into and decided to write up a little guide.

Step 1 of 1

Add MathJax CDN to the Head section of the generated HTML, per the MathJax documentation. The HTML Head section is under Tools > Options > Advanced > HTML Head Editor in MarkdownPad 2.

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

And that’s it! I can now add TeX or MathML to my markdown docs and get MathJax-formatted output in the resulting HTML documents.

The only “gotcha” that I found was that the default delimiters for inline TeX or LaTex are ( and ), which MarkdownPad 2 will eat as an escape sequence, so we need to escape the slashes as so: \( and\).

Example

When I type the following into MarkdownPad 2:

When \\( a \ne 0 \\), there are two solutions to \\(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\\) and they are:
$$ x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a} $$

It should appear as below once rendered in a browser (F6 to preview):

When a≠0, there are two solutions to ax2+bx+c=0 and they are:

WordPress

WordPress.com doesn’t support a hot-linked JavaScript library, or any JavaScript, so we’ll need to manually convert our delimiters to the WordPress.com latex syntax. Wordpress.org users can install a MathJax plugin instead and hopefully avoid these manual updates.

Conclusion

The only thing I’m missing is a live preview from within MarkdownPad 2, but I’m willing to live without that as long as I can turn in math homework without picking up a pencil. Now I’ve got a whole boatload of TeX/LaTex syntax to learn!