markdown-latex-prerender 0.1.1

An extension to python-markdown that replaces inline latex with prerendered SVGs

Markdown LaTeX Prerenderer

This is a very simple python-markdown extension, similar to other markdon-latex implementations that adds support for latex in markdown files.

The key differences to other approaches are:

1. It does not require javascript on the client
2. It does not require nodejs when building

For some reason, I could not find a way to render latex inside a markdown file without Javascript, that seemed crazy to me. So I built this tool. No KaTeX required. No NodeJS required. Just classic latex implementations.

How to use:

Make sure you have dvilualatex and dvisvgm installed on your system.

Then, add LatexExtension to your markdown extension list:

import markdown
from markdown_latex_prerender import LatexExtension

markdown.markdown(
    md_str,
    extensions=[
        LatexExtension(),
        ...
    ],
)

How it works:

It uses the hosts dvilualatex and dvisvgm (both usually come with TexLive and friends) to convert a latex snippet to an svg file. **It does not ship either program itself. This is why it's less that 200 lines of code.

Do not feed it untrusted input. It may break. Or worse.

Caching:

You may want to cache rendered things. For this, you can do something like this:

from my_fav_caching_library import cache_function

import markdown_latex_prerenderer.render as render

render.render_latex = cache_function(render.render_latex)

Or whatever else you feel like doing.

Inpiration:

Since I don't know how to build a python-markdown module to render inline-latex, I asked chatGPT looked at other peoples solutions. I found this: arithmatex.py in facelessuser/pymdown-extensions. I re-used a lot of their code. I guess it works.