While rebuilding this blog with pelican from a xml export of the previous Wordpress version, I had to face how to regenerate the LaTeX equations inserted within some posts.

Wordpress used to take care of the equation generation through the use of a plugin, taking as input the code between $ labels like this: code-block::latex [latex size="4"] \frac { \sum{(nota \cdot creditos)} } { \sum{creditos} }$


Generating an image with the LaTeX result and placing it whithin the post:

In order to replicate the same (command-line way) so LaTeX equations could be inserted in my posts as images, I came up with the following script:

code-block::bash
#!/bin/bash

TMPNAME=tmpfile
TMP=/tmp/$TMPNAME echo "\documentclass[14pt,english]{article}" >$TMP
echo "\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}" >> $TMP echo "\thispagestyle{empty}" >>$TMP
echo "\begin{document}" >> $TMP echo "$ ${1}$" >> $TMP echo "\end{document}" >>$TMP

pdflatex $TMP pdfcrop$TMPNAME.pdf $TMPNAME.pdf pdf2svg$TMPNAME.pdf $2 rm -f$TMPNAME.pdf \$TMP


Which generates a LaTeX document on the fly with no styles at all, compiles it to pdf using pdflatex, eliminates all margins using pdfcrop and converts it to the final svg image with pdf2svg.

The result can be inserted in the post as an svg image. I’m still wondering if this could be a desirable extension for the markdown reader of pelican