When I first started blogging I was really interested in having LaTeX equation support. After all, software development hasn’t always been my vocation – I did go to school for electrical engineering and have had my fair share of math classes Image may be NSFW.
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2 years ago getting LaTeX working within WordPress was incredibly difficult. It required installing ImageMagick, dvips, and a myriad of other tools on your hosting server. I asked Hostgator support if this was possible, only to be told an emphatic ‘no’ – the Linux VMs used to host my website were significantly sandboxed and this was not possible, so I gave up.
Fast forward to today – not only has WordPress made significant advances in update functionality – it is now trivial to add new plugins. What used to take hours on an SSH commandline now is possible with only a few clicks.
Here are the steps to follow:
- Log into the admin console and click on the Plugins tab.
- Click on Add New
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- Search for ‘latex’
- Find “WP Latex” in the list and click on ‘Install Now’:
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Clik here to view. - Go to the Plugins tab, find ‘WP LaTeX’, and click ‘Active’
Now it’s just a matter of composing a blog post with equations embedded between Image may be NSFW.
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tags.
I like using Windows Live Writer for composing blog post, and this works perfectly. All that I need to do is create a new paragraph, enter the equation text in LaTeX, and then center align it (screenshot of WLW):
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Here’s the rendered equation:
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Very cool. Image may be NSFW.
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