MathJax with Kramdown

Last week, GitHub Pages upgraded to Jekyll 3.0. One major consequence of the upgrade is that, for Jekyll sites hosted on GitHub Pages, only the kramdown engine is supported.

This broke my existing MathJax setup – I was using the redcarpet Markdown engine before, which understood math with the delimiters \\( \LaTeX \\) and \\[ \LaTeX \\] for inline and displayed math, respectively.

kramdown only recognizes $$ \LaTeX $$ for both inline and displayed math. This means that it will automatically infer whether you want inline or displayed math.

Here’s the live demo with inline \(\LaTeX\) and displayed

\[\LaTeX\]

This is an easy fix unless you have a lot of old posts with LaTeX to convert, in which case you should probably write a small converter script to switch your math delimiters to $$.