wagtail-polymath

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wagtail-polymath allows you to write equations in yourWagtail content using markup and render them beautifully.

wagtail-polymath provides a MathBlock so you can write equations in markup (TeX, MathML, ASCIIMath) and render them with a typesetting engine (MathJax or KaTeX), with MathJax being the default. It features a live preview:

MathBlock uses MathJax for rendering so there is very little to do on the front end. Include the chosen typesetting engine JavaScript (and optionally CSS), and render the raw MathBlock content as you would for any other streamfield plain text block.

wagtail-polymath includes a template tag to include the chosen typesetting engine library files for you from a CDN. MathJax is configured to accept all recognised markup (TeX, MathML, ASCIIMath) and renders them to HTML.

For help on using the markup languages see the relevant MathJax documentation (e.g. https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/index.html) and the markup language-specific documentation (e.g. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX)

Quickstart

Install wagtail_polymath:

pip install wagtail_polymath

Add it to your INSTALLED_APPS:

# settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    "wagtail_polymath",
    # ...
)

Use MathBlock in your StreamField content:

from wagtail import blocks
from wagtail.fields import StreamField
from wagtail.models import Page
from wagtail_polymath.blocks import MathBlock


class MyPage(Page):
    body = StreamField(
        [
            ("heading", blocks.CharBlock(classname="full title")),
            ("paragraph", blocks.RichTextBlock()),
            ("equation", MathBlock()),
        ]
    )

Use the polymath_scripts template tag in your front-end template to load the typesetting library:

{% load wagtail_polymath %}
...

{% polymath_scripts %}

Configuration

All wagtail-polymath settings are defined in a single WAGTAIL_POLYMATHdictionary in your settings file.

# settings.py
WAGTAIL_POLYMATH = {
    "engine": "mathjax",  # Optional. Allowed values: "mathjax", "katex". Defaults to "mathjax",
    "libraries": [
        {
            "url": "...",  # Required. A fully qualified URL
            "sri": "...",  # Optional. The Subresource Integrity hash
        },
        ...,
    ],
}

By default, wagtail-polymath loads the typesetting library from jsDelivr, pinned to a specific version with a matching Subresource Integrity (SRI) hash, so the browser can verify the script hasn't been tampered with.

If you'd rather load the typesetting library from a different CDN, your own static files, or a different version, set the relevant entrieslibrary_url to the full script URL:

# settings.py
WAGTAIL_POLYMATH = {
    "libraries": [
        {"url": "https://example.com/path/to/tex-mml-chtml.js"},
    ]
}

Since we can't know the SRI hash for a script we don't control, setting a custom URL on its own disables integrity checking for that script (no integrity/crossorigin attributes are rendered). If you want that protection back, set sri to the hash for your chosen file:

# settings.py
WAGTAIL_POLYMATH = {
    "libraries": [
        {
            "url": "https://example.com/path/to/tex-mml-chtml.js",
            "sri": "sha256-...",
        }
    ]
}

The sri has no effect unless url is also set — the built-in default URL always uses its own pinned hash.

To generate the hash for your chosen file, download it and use openssl. Note that the integrity attribute requires a base64-encoded digest — sha256sum/shasum produce a hex digest instead, which will not work:

openssl dgst -sha256 -binary tex-mml-chtml.js | openssl base64 -A

Prefix the output with sha256- to get the full library_sri value:

WAGTAIL_POLYMATH = {
    "libraries": [
        {
            "url": "https://example.com/path/to/tex-mml-chtml.js",
            "sri": "sha256-dPV35kaoLq1rg+JbYf8p1kTrZamwMY+XIwaWUPwqtpU=",
        }
    ]
}

Both settings apply to the typesetting script loaded in the Wagtail admin (for the MathBlock live preview) and the one loaded by the polymath_scripts template tag.

Note that if you are using MathJax, the bundled preview JS assumes MathJax's combined tex-mml-chtml component and its input/asciimath loader — if you switch to a different version or build of MathJax, you're responsible for keeping it compatible with that configuration.

Contributing

All contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md

Supported versions:

• Python 3.10-3.15
• Django 5.2, 6.0, 6.1
• Wagtail 7.0 (LTS), 7.4 (LTS), 8.0