Enable LaTeX Support?

Just a thought:

LaTeX is a great option to have during those rare but frustrating moments when Markdown is just “not enough”.

Discourse does not support it out of the box, but there is a battle-tested plugin for Discourse that renders LaTeX via MathJax.

Some screenshots below.


Inline block $ like this $

$\int_0^\infty\frac{\log\left(\frac{1+x^{4+\sqrt{15}}}{1+x^{2+\sqrt{3}}}\right)}{\left(1+x^2\right)\log x}\mathrm dx$

renders as:


Standalone block:

\begin{array}{c|cc}
\hline A & B & C\\
\hline D & E & F\\
\hline
\end{array}

produces:

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I think it might be good idea, but I don’t know how commonly it will be used.

How often have you needed LaTeX on GitHub? I have never thought to use it.

Neither did I.

The thing is, “language shapes the way you think”.
If you are limited to Markdown, you will think in Markdown only.
Enabling LaTeX opens up more ways to express yourself.

I would love to have LaTex support enabled but I haven’t figured out yet how to enable it. I have actually missed the support from Github a couple of times.

@erlend_sh is there an easy way to add a plugin like that here? I haven’t found anything in the admin ui except the already existing plugins.

There is a unofficial MathJax plugin:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/mathjax-plugin-supports-math-notation-using-latex/12826

But we don’t currently have the bandwidth to support this on our hosted service. We’re seeing an increasing amount of scientific communities adopt Discourse though, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until we can make MathJax/LaTeX support a priority.

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