Saturday, August 13, 2011

Latex for Blogger: Pandoc

The previous post showed some new math rendering tools for supporting Latex for Blogger. That still relied on htlatex (in the tex4ht package) for converting Latex into HTML. I just found another tool called Pandoc that converts between lots of different markup languages. Here’s the first paragraph from the manpage.

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read markdown and (subsets of) Textile, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX; and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, Medi‐ aWiki markup, EPUB, Textile, groff man pages, Emacs Org-Mode, and Slidy or S5 HTML slide shows.

Sounds promising. So, this post is written in Latex, and then I converted it to HTML with this command:

  [jstults@grafton pandoc]$ pandoc -f latex -t html -o pandoc.html pandoc.tex 

Here’s some test equations:
f(x) = x2

$\frac{\partial U}{\partial t} = \nabla U $

Φ  = ϕ - ∫ t0tf(τ) dτ

6 comments:

  1. hmm, doesn't seem to convert the second equation into something that MathJax will render.

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  2. Concur, FAIL on the second equation.

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  3. With those options, pandoc won't use mathjax. It just tries as best it can to render the formula in Unicode. Try using the `--mathjax` option or one of the other math options that pandoc supports (for mathjax, you'll need to have a way to load the mathjax script into the page; not sure how to do that on blogger).

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  4. Oops. Hadn't read your previous post. So

    pandoc -f latex -t html --mathjax -o pandoc.html pandoc.tex

    should get you what you want.

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  5. The URL for the --mathjax option is not optional (it is for --mathml and --jsmath), so the full command is (using the script from the previous post):

    pandoc -f latex -t html --mathjax=http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML -o foo.html foo.tex

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