Typesetting math in defblocks

[Nidish96]

Firstly great package, thanks a lot!!

While typesetting inline math on org, I usually just use $$ and proceed, and the latex interpreter interprets it as latex math and the html interpreter does the right thing too.

But the following doesn't work:

#+begin_details SDOF equations are $m\ddot{x}=f(t)$ The above is a differential equation with $\ddot{x}$. #+end_details

Here's the result to this on html :

On pdflatex :

As you can see, the second math equation works properly, but the first one doesn't.

Is there any easy way to fix this?

[Nidish96]

Update: delimiting the $s and /s I could get the above to work with latex but not with html:

SDOF equations are \$m\\ddot{x}=f(t)\$ yields what is expected on latex.

[alhassy]

I'm glad you like the package ❤️

The way that the special blocks work is that their main argument is actually a string literal; it is not generally interpreted as Org markup. As such, if we treat it as a string then we just need to escape the relevant parts:

#+begin_details "SDOF equations are \\(m\\ddot{x}=f(t)\\)"
The above is a differential equation with $\ddot{x}$.
#+end_details

This works and produces, in HTML:

It seems that the above string fact should be better documented. Sorry about that 😅

[Nidish96]

Thanks for the response (apologies for my delay).

I can confirm that your solution works. But I found it interesting that the following works,

#+begin_details "SDOF equations are \\(m\\ddot{x}=f(t)\\)"
The above is a differential equation with $\ddot{x}$.
#+end_details

but this does not:

#+begin_details "SDOF equations are \$m\\ddot{x}=f(t)\$"
The above is a differential equation with $\ddot{x}$.
#+end_details

Output of the second version is:

This might just be a minor point, since latex supports both $ eqn $ as well as \( eqn \) for inline math, but i was just curious if there was any particular reason for this.

[alhassy]

but i was just curious if there was any particular reason for this.

@Nidish96 This is because Org needs to see some top-level math before loading MathJax ---see Issue #17 for a MWE Org file that mentions this issue and demonstrates it.