Is there any way to ignore underscore when rendering markdown?

support
1

I have many markdown files with lots of mathjax formulas. When rendering those files, the underscore character ‘_’ in math formulas are treated as italic mark. I have noticed the official document provided a solution, but it requires modify the markdown files, which will be a hard work since there are lots of formulas.
Is there any way to ignore underscore when rendering markdown?

2

I think I’ve found a perfect solution to insert math equations in a markdown file. Just using pandoc to convert all math equations to png files. It works fine.

3

No. As you noted, the best solution we have is provided in the docs.

4

Thanks for bringing this up @lianera . “Tutorials” isn’t always the most obvious place to look for this kind of information.

NB, the “Tutorials” section no longer exists in the new concept site.

5

Can’t the Markdown parser used by Hugo be made smarter about ignoring underscores inside math formulas? Or is it that it has no awareness of math formulas at all?

6

Yep, Blackfriday doesn’t understand math formulas.

This has remained unmerged for years: Add Math support (MathJaX) to blackfriday.v2 by Vonng · Pull Request #412 · russross/blackfriday · GitHub.

My hope is that when Hugo upgrades to a more actively maintained Markdown parser ( Make Goldmark the new default markdown renderer · Issue #5963 · gohugoio/hugo · GitHub ), such issues could probably resolved in a more timely manner.

7

Thanks for the reply! That’s unfortunate, and hope the situation improves soon. Meanwhile I discovered that in addition to underscores, also expressions like \{ and \\ need to be escaped inside math expressions, which makes it all quite inconvenient. Thanks for the glimmer of hope :slight_smile:

8

You have just started; there’s a lot more! :wink:

(I am the maintainer of an Org mode → Markdown Emacs package. It produces Markdown which is compatible with Blackfriday, without messing up the LaTeX equations; above is how I need to handle it there.)

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9

I would like to know if there’s now a complete solution for MathJax. The tutorial link above is dead and I couldn’t find such tutorial anywhere, it seems to be outdated thus removed?

@kaushalmodi I have read the README of your ox-hugo and I’m sorry to say that I still have no idea what the package does and how to use it with Hugo. If ox-hugo can fix the issue with the math formulas then I would love to give it a try.

10

ox-hugo is a package for the Emacs text editor. If you do not use Emacs, they it won’t be of much help.

Read further if you are still interested.

ox-hugo basically takes the user’s blog content in Org mode, which I believe is far superior to Markdown, and transforms that to Markdown that Hugo (Goldmark/Blackfriday) can understand. In the process of that conversion, it also puts in workarounds for the bugs in Goldmark/Blackfriday (like MathJAX support). In the above example I posted, ox-hugo auto-escapes the characters that need to be. That way, the user does not need to write overly-escaped MathJAX in their source Org file.

11

Asking again in 2022. Is there a way to escape underscore characters in equations so they aren’t processed as markdown? I’m using katex with the default goldmark renderer.