# Using LaTeX Math on your Hakyll blog

Posted on August 13, 2013 by
in

Hakyll is a really powerful static website tool written in Haskell. Basically, it takes a bunch of text files in Markdown and puts them together into an awesome static website (like this one!). Out of the box, Hakyll already does a lot, but one thing it doesn’t do is math formulae.

Luckily this isn’t too hard to set up. Hakyll uses the wonderful Pandoc package to generate HTML, and Pandoc supports embedding math in HTML. According to this page, all we need to do is enable the tex_math_dollars option. Just for extra swag, we’ll enable the tex_math_double_backslash and latex_macros options. This will let Pandoc understand latex block math and to expand latex macros that we define in our Markdown files!

To do this, we’re going to modify the Pandoc compiler shipped with Hakyll. First we need to import some modules

import qualified Data.Set as S
import           Text.Pandoc.Options

Now we’re going to define our new compiler. By default, Hakyll uses the pandocCompiler function to compile Markdown files into HTML. This function uses the default Hakyll options to generate HTML. There’s also the pandocCompilerWith function, which does take options. Its type signature is

pandocCompilerWith :: ReaderOptions -> WriterOptions -> Compiler (Item String)

Since we’re only going to want to change how Pandoc outputs HTML, we’re going to use the default reader options in defaultHakyllReaderOptions. If we take a look at the WriterOptions data type, we find two fields that we might be interested in: writerHTMLMathMethod and writerExtensions. The writerHTMLMathMethod field tells Pandoc how we want it to output the math in HTML. I found the easiest way to be using Mathjax. Looking at the HTMLMathMethod type, it looks like we’ll need to set this field to MathJax "". Now, to enable the three extensions in our compiler, we’ll need to add Ext_tex_math_dollars, Ext_tex_math_double_backslash, and Ext_latex_macros into the writerExtensions set. We can do this by folding with the Data.Set.insert function.

Let’s define our new Pandoc math compiler!

pandocMathCompiler =
let mathExtensions = [Ext_tex_math_dollars, Ext_tex_math_double_backslash,
Ext_latex_macros]
defaultExtensions = writerExtensions defaultHakyllWriterOptions
newExtensions = foldr S.insert defaultExtensions mathExtensions
writerOptions = defaultHakyllWriterOptions {
writerExtensions = newExtensions,
writerHTMLMathMethod = MathJax ""
}
in pandocCompilerWith defaultHakyllReaderOptions writerOptions

Most of this should be self-explanatory, but essentially, we modify the default Hakyll Pandoc options to use the new math output method and to use the appropriate math extensions.

Now, all we have to do is replace all instances of pandocCompiler with pandocMathCompiler in our site’s main function, and we’re almost good to go! I say almost, because you will probably need to add the following line into your templates/default.html (or whatever template contains your HTML <head> element):

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

Now, try adding math to one of your pages and see if it works. A quick word of warning though: to do the LaTeX $ and $ you need to double up on slashes, and you need to double the slashes before each command.

As a quick proof, here’s what it looks like rendering one definition of the natural log.

$\ln x = \int_{-\infty}^x \frac 1 y \, dy .$

This was generated from the code:

\$\\ln x = \\int_{-\\infty}^x \\frac 1 y \\, dy . \$

Great! You’re all set to use math on your shiny new Hakyll blog! Happy blogging! :D