[pmwiki-users] Current recommendation for inserting LaTeX markup?

Sat Jul 12 13:05:40 PDT 2025

Petko Yotov <5ko at 5ko.fr> writes:

> I would recommend Cookbook/MathJax: the maintainer Said is an active 
> administrator and can assist if needed.
>
> Petko
>
> On 08/07/2025 12:55, Christopher Pinon wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> If I look at
>> 
>> https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki?n=PmWiki.PmWiki&action=search&q=latex
>> 
>> there are a number of suggestions, many of them rather old.
>> 
>> My sense is that
>> 
>> https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MathJax
>> 
>> or
>> 
>> https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/TrueLatex
>> 
>> would be the current recommendation. Of these two, MathJax is simpler
>> because it (naturally) uses MathJax, whereas TrueLatex requires a local
>> LaTeX installation.
>> 
>> Do any of you have a preferred way of inserting LaTeX markup?

I just wanted to post a short update on this.

The context: I'm using v2.4.6 of PmWiki, which is the latest stable
version. The current version of MathJax is v3.2.2, and the legacy
version is v2.7.9 -- see https://www.mathjax.org/ .

I tried Cookbook/MathJax with v2 of MathJax (which is the version that
the recipe was designed for), but unfortunately, it doesn't work at all
(unless I missed something obvious). :-( Since there are no error
messages that I could see, it also isn't so clear to me what the problem
is.

I also tried Cookbook/LaTeXMathJax (a possibility that I didn't mention
above), which is older than Cookbook/MathJax, and it was a pleasant
surprise to see that it does work, but it's also designed for v2 of
MathJax and in addition, it requires MathJax to be installed locally.

After a little reflection, I decided to pursue a different strategy. In
local/config.php , I simply put

$HTMLHeaderFmt['mathjax3'] =
  '<script type="text/javascript" id="MathJax-script" async
    src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js">
  </script>';

which adds the URL of MathJax v3 to the <head> section of the page. With
this modification, MathJax v3 becomes available and can be tested in
PmWiki with the following text/markup:

  This is a test of MathJax v3.

  This is an example of an in-line equation: \( \frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!} = \binom{n}{k} \)

  Each of the following two examples is a displayed equation (which means that the equation is placed on a new line and centered):

  \[ \lim\limits_{x \to \infty} \exp(-x) = 0 \]

  \[ \sum_{i=1}^{n}i = \frac{n(n+1)}{2} \]

For convenience, I also put this text/markup in an HTML file in order to
illustrate how it should appear:
https://versioning.org/tmp/mathjax3.html

I think that this is currently the simplest way to use MathJax in
PmWiki, but naturally, if one wanted to have more flexibility (e.g. the
possibility of using a local MathJax installation), various parameters
would need to be introduced.

C.