# WordPress does LaTeX

posted in: Stuff, Tech |

While I was setting up another wordpress site today, I found out to my great surprise that WordPress can actually do $\LaTeX$ markup by simply installing the jetpack plugin.

For those that don’t know, $\LaTeX$ is a computer typesetting system that really shines for difficult typesetting problems like mathematical formulas and scientific text. For more detail see What are $\TeX$ $\LaTeX$ and friends

It is now possible to do nicely formated formulas directly in WordPress, like:

$f(x) = \sin x$

or

$f(x) = \sum_{i=0}^\infty (-1)^i \frac{x^{2i+1}}{(2i+1)!}$

or
$U=N\Biggl[ \frac{3kT}{2} + \frac{(\epsilon_{eI2}-\epsilon_{eI1}) \frac{\Omega_2}{\Omega_1} \frac{\epsilon_{eI2} - \epsilon_{eI1}}{kT}}{ 1+ \frac{\Omega_2}{\Omega_1} \frac{\epsilon_{eI2} - \epsilon_{eI1}}{kT}} \Biggr]$

The plugin simply takes the $\LaTeX$ markup and generates a graphic from it and puts it into the post. Anyone that uses $\LaTeX$ will be able to do this without the help of a WordPress plugin, but for people like me that use $\LaTeX$ for all their documents (even invoices) it is kind off cool to be able to put the $\LaTeX$ markup straight into the wordpress editor.

You can use $\LaTeX$ for any type of document and unlike Microsoft Word it actually manages to number pages correctly and generate correct tables of content and indexes. If you want to try it out go to http://www.tug.org/begin.html

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