The Atom editor
I’ve been using the Atom editor for a few months and I am very pleased with it overall. It doesn’t beat well-developed, language-specific IDEs such as R-Studio or iPython Notebooks, but it works very well for general purpose editing and in cases where there isn’t a comprehensive IDE available (e.g., Julia). It has an active development community and that translates into a lot of extensibility. It has broad support for syntax highlighting and markdown editing, including a very helpful live markdown preview. Both of those features make writing markdown with embedded code very easy.
However, when I recently tried to include some LaTeX in one of my markdown files I hit a roadblock. Atom doesn’t support LaTeX in markdown previews out of the box and the solution took a little longer to find than I think it should have. Ergo, I’m posting this information in hopes that it might help others find the solution faster.
Defining the parameters
To be clear, this isn’t about rendering .tex files in Atom. if you’re looking for a package to build and display pure .tex files, that’s fairly straightforward – start with the latex package.
The goal here is to display LaTeX blocks and inline LaTeX in markdown, i.e., .md file previews. Being clear on that distinction can save you a good bit of time, as getting the latex package set up can take a while and it’s not required at all for markdown files. If you start there, you’ll waste an hour or two of your valuable time.
Markdown Preview Plus
The key to getting LaTeX to display in Atom markdown previews is the Markdown Preview Plus package. It is a fork of the core markdown preview package that adds several features, one of which is LaTeX support (via MathJax*).
What this package does can be a little unclear from the description, with some people assuming it provides support for .tex files (it does not). But I assure you, if you’re looking to preview LaTeX in your .md files this is what you want.
The install is simple:
apm install markdown-preview-plus
then disable the markdown preview package that ships with Atom (markdown-preview). Details on the installation process are here, if you need them.
After that, you need to know how to use the package. The docs are pretty clear that ctrl-shift-m opens a preview and ctrl-shift-x turns on math support, but that’s only half the battle. If you try to use straight LaTeX from there you’ll get no love. The key is in this doc – namely, you need to add $$ to delineate your math blocks and $ for inline math.
And you’re done
With that information in hand, you should be good to go, hopefully in less time than it would have taken otherwise.
* The distinction between LaTeX and MathJax may or may not be important for your purposes.