IkiWiki's default support for math is rather clumsy and old-fashioned. Also, it requires a working LaTeX installation.
A much better option is Pandoc, available to IkiWiki users through the IkiWiki::Plugin::pandoc plugin (which can be found in a few versions on GitHub). However, it has some drawbacks as well:
- If you are using shared hosting, Pandoc can be cumbersome to install.
- If you don't need its markdown extensions, footnotes, extra source and target formats, bibliography support, etc., but just want to have some nicely formatted math on your wiki/blog, Pandoc seems like overkill.
- Because an external process will be called for each page, a rebuild of a large wiki takes an uncomfortably long time.
- It is difficult to get Pandoc with MathJax and the smiley plugin to work together, since the latter tends mangle the content which MathJax is supposed to work its magic on.
- You need to change page.tmpl, which means that you have to check for compatibility with the new page.tmpl every time you upgrade IkiWiki.
This simple plugin solves these issues, making it easy to use MathJax in IkiWiki. Features:
- No changes to page.tmpl are needed -- the MathJax Javascript is only loaded on pages where it is needed.
- Both display (
$$...$$ or \[...\]) and inline ($...$ or \(...\)) math are supported. Just take care that inline math must stay on one line in your markdown source. A single literal dollar sign in a line does not need to be escaped, but two do.
If you want to change the MathJax configuration, you currently must edit the source of the module. I may later add configuration hooks so that one may control its behaviour through the setup file for the wiki. Let me know if you need this.