Notes on using LaTeX to generate formulae

Summary

This post collects some notes on using LaTeX to render mathematical documents and formulae, mostly focused on a Linux machine. For background, I typically use LaTeX for one of two (related) purposes: Render math for my blog posts, which are usually written using reStructuredText. This sometimes includes diagrams generated using TikZ. Write personal (unpublished) notes on math-y subjects entirely in LaTeX. These are typically short (up to 10-20 pages), single-subject booklets. I don't currently use LaTeX for either precise typesetting or for authoring very large, book-sized documents. Editing For day-to-day authoring, I find TeXstudio to be excellent. It has everything I need for local editing with a convenient preview window. I really like that TeXstudio doesn't hide the fact that it's just a graphical veneer on top of command-line LaTeX tooling, and lets you examine what it's doing through logs. Note that web-based solutions like Overleaf exist; I can see myself using that, especially if collaborating with others or having to author LaTeX from a diverse set of computers and OSes, but for local editing of git-backed text files, TeXstudio is great. Converting to other formats with pandoc pandoc is very capable for converting documents from LaTeX to other formats. Recently I find that it's easier to write math-heavy blog posts in LaTeX, and then convert them to reStructuredText with pandoc. For example, the recent post on Hilbert spaces was written like this and then converted using this command: $ pandoc -f latex -s -t rst hilbert.tex The resulting reStructuredText is very readable and requires very little tweaking before final publishing. pandoc supports many formats, so if you use Markdown or something else, it should work similarly well. Rendering standalone formulae or diagrams A useful feature of LaTeX tooling is the ability to render a specific formula in standalone mode to an image. We can write the formula into its own file (call it standaloneformula.tex): \d...