Can I use Latex and Markdown simultaneously?

[ernestyao]

I love Rmarkdown. But sometimes I have to use latex in Rmd to write some formula. I tried like

$$latex f(x;\mu,\sigma^2) = \frac{1}{\sigma\sqrt{2\pi}} e^{ -\frac{1}{2}\left(\frac{x-\mu}{\sigma}\right)^2 } $$

It does not work. How can I get results like this? I don't use Rnw since I don't know latex a lot and formula are seldom in my paper. Thanks in advance.

[andrewheiss]

Yep. See the R Markdown documentation. The ST package won't do syntax highlighting for LaTeX like that, but it should compile just fine with knitr.

[ernestyao]

Thanks for your reply. But when I build the .Rmd file, got the same latex code block in .md file. Markdown Preview can't display it in equation form. What else should I do? I'm using LatexTools. And I find the modification to LatexTools deals with .Rnw file only.

Update:

I solved it myself. I misunderstood your meaning. It's the browser's job to render inline Latex instead of ST. I found a booklet here can do it: http://web.mit.edu/jcalz/Public/Reddit/mathbookmarklet.html. It works on my Mac with Safari 7.0.2.

[andrewheiss]

Yeah, HTML can't handle LaTeX natively. You can use Pandoc to convert from markdown to HTML and use a template that includes MathJax or something so that it renders the LaTeX automatically when you open the file in a browser. It works natively in RStudio because that's what they do—include MathJax in the preview.