valerio.net

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

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:

1. Log into the admin console and click on the Plugins tab.
2. Click on Add New
   
3. Search for ‘latex’
4. Find “WP Latex” in the list and click on ‘Install Now’:
   
5. 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 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):

Here’s the rendered equation:

Very cool.

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