This is not a typical post for this blog, but it was just convenient to
put the following here. Feel free to skip this post if you are reading
this blog for the normal content and haven't gotten here by searching
for just this.
I spent a few hours at work today researching how best to add math
(displayed equations) support to the docutils ReStructuredText parser
for use with the MoinMoin wiki engine. I put my findings up here for
the search engines to pick up in case more people need this.
The best solution today seems to be jsMath. It is more versatile than
the various LaTeX -> dvi -> png solutions (and easier to set up). It is
also much better supported than MathML.
Docutils, which is the library used by MoinMoin to render
ReStructuredText to html, does not yet support math natively (as of
version 0.6). Fortunately it can easily be extended with new directives.
The only thing you need to do is add the following code to a Python
file that is executed while rendering your wiki pages. The theme module
is a good place, just stick the following at the bottom of your theme's
.py file:
# LaTeX support
from docutils.parsers.rst import directives, roles
from docutils import nodes
def latex_directive(name, arguments, options, content, lineno, content_offset, block_text, state, state_machine):
latex = '\n'.join(content)
return [nodes.raw('', '\\['+latex+'\\]', format='html')]
latex_directive.content = 1
directives.register_directive('latex', latex_directive)
def latex_role(name, rawtext, text, lineno, inliner, options={}, content=[]):
latex = rawtext.split('`')[1].replace('\\\\','\\') # Restore escaped backslashes
return [nodes.raw(rawtext, '\\('+latex+'\\)', format='html')], []
roles.register_canonical_role('latex', latex_role)
This is a bit of a hack as it uses the old style function-as-directive
model, but hey, it works, and I did not even know of docutils directives
until today, so working is most definitely a big plus :-) It is based on
this, but simplified a whole lot due to using jsMath to render the
LaTeX equations.
You also need to include
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/jsMath/easy/load.js"></script>
somewhere in your html code. I put it in the page header with an ugly
hack by adding the script to the output around line 680 of
MoinMoin/theme/__index__.py. It can (and should) probably go in your
theme's .py file somewhere so that it does not disappear when MoinMoin
is upgraded. I did not bother to do this for testing purposes, though.
Now you can write :latex:`e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0` in your wiki pages and
it should be rendered to \(e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0\) in the final output
(which seems like a small change, but believe me, it is easier this way
then double backslashing the LaTeX code in the wiki page. You can also
have displaymath equations with the following syntax:
.. latex:: e^{quation} g_{oes} = here
which is turned into
\[ e^{quation} g_{oes} = here \]
The \( ... \) and \[ ... \] is picked up by jsMath and turned
into beautiful equations (depending on field of work and definition of
beautiful ;-) ). For non-javascript enabled browsers the code is left as
is, so the equation can still be deciphered by LaTeX savvy readers. See
here for examples of what jsMath can do.
So, in the end it was fairly easy to get good looking math support in
MoinMoin. Hopefully docutils will come with jsMath support in the
future. The new upcoming 0.5 version of Sphinx seems to do, and it is
based on docutils and ReST. Shinx is a new documentation power tool for
Python developers. Highly recommended to make documenting code a bit
more fun.
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