Math and LaTeX

Markdown with inline and display math, and a latex cell

jOtter renders LaTeX math as real equations in the terminal. It uses RaTeX, a math renderer built into jOtter, so you don’t need a TeX installation.

In markdown cells

Write math as in Jupyter:

Inline math like $e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$ flows with the text.

Display math gets its own line:

$$
\hat H \psi = E \psi, \qquad \hat H = -\frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2 + V(\mathbf r)
$$

Inline math never splits across wrapped lines. It’s drawn on the text’s baseline at the text’s size, within one terminal row; an expression that needs more room, like a fraction in big parentheses, is shrunk to fit and centred in the row. Write such fractions as 1/2 inline, or give the expression its own line with $$.

Display math is at most four rows tall; taller equations, such as a sum with limits, are scaled down to fit. Change the limit with max_math_rows.

Latex cells

Press t until a cell becomes a latex cell. Its whole content is rendered as display math; the surrounding $$ are optional. In the file it is a raw cell with metadata.format set to text/latex, the same convention JupyterLab and nbconvert use.

LaTeX outputs

Outputs of type text/latex render as equations too. For example, SymPy:

import sympy as sp
x = sp.symbols('x')
sp.init_printing()
sp.integrate(sp.exp(-x**2), (x, -sp.oo, sp.oo))

What’s supported

RaTeX covers what notebooks typically use: fractions, roots, sub- and superscripts, Greek letters and symbols, operators like \sum, \int and \prod, matrices and aligned environments, accents, and \mathbf, \mathrm, \mathcal and similar fonts. It doesn’t run TeX macros or load packages. If an equation can’t be rendered, jOtter shows its source instead.

Equations are rendered once when the cell is displayed and then cached, so they don’t slow scrolling down.