Commands Needed

The easiest step was from the Jekyll Docs, which pointed me to this page on Visually Enforced. So the following piece of code went into my /_layouts/default.html ’s header:

<script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML">
</script>

Testing the site was too slow with GitHub Pages, so I served the site locally to see changes on every refresh: bundle exec jekyll serve

Links on this page

• Jekyll Docs
• Visually Enforced
• kramdown
• Supported LaTeX Commands
• StackExchange Proof QED

The Details

To make sure everything worked after adding the MathJax line, I found a nice chunk of code from kramdown in their syntax guide. The $\LaTeX$ rendered beautifully and had no issues whatsoever. I had done some more digging and saw that kramdown already supports “Math Blocks”, so to test it, I removed the MathJax script from my template. It broke the nice piece of $\LaTeX$ code from earlier, so I quickly put the script back.

The next test I wanted to try was to see what commands were available to me because I couldn’t find a list anywhere. So I grabbed a proof I wrote from my Real Analysis class and threw it into a Markdown file. It kept rendering it as text in a box; basically like I used some CSS to give that chunk of text an outline. From there, I kept playing with it, in hopes that something would work. kramdown said that everything should be in $$...$$, which I tried and only got a group of -box-outlined text. Then I thought maybe I need to import the AMS Math package somewhere. It was after that thought, I think, that I stumbled upon a list of Supported LaTeX Commands…

So after all of that work, it turns out the proof environment I was using is unsupported. That’s alright though, since that was mainly for the TeX engine to put a fancy italic Proof at the start of my work and a box at the end. I can format the Proof first, and probably put the black box at the end.

Anyway, I’ll have to spend some time looking through what commands I can and cannot use, but I am happy to have them at all. I doubt anyone who wrote the pages that helped me in this process will ever see this page, but thank you!

In Summary

It was a little confusing at first, but so was setting up Jekyll in the first place. The confusion was mainly due to the fact that I had to dig through Jekyll support pages, kramdown support pages, and MathJax support pages. In the end though, it just took some trial and error on a local version of my site to figure out what works and what doesn’t.