Add MathJax Support to Jekyll and Hugo

I was using Mathjax v2 for a while and I heard v3 perform significantly faster than v2. Many great tutorials explains explains how to add Mathjax support to Jekyll websites. Some of them only cover Mathjax v2. So here is the brief summary on how to add Mathjax v3 support to your Jekyll website (Recently I’ve migrated to Hugo but adding support to Hugo is also pretty similar).

• In the _config.yml located in your root directory, add this line:

markdown: kramdown

• Create a file called mathjax.html insides _includes/, add these lines (these settings come from the Mathjax documentation):

<script>
MathJax = {
  tex: {
    inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)'] ]
  },
  svg: {
    fontCache: 'global'
  }
};
</script>
<script
  type="text/javascript" id="MathJax-script" async
  src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-svg.js">
</script>

For Hugo website, the script will be exactly the same. The only difference is instead of putting mathjax.html into _includes/, you would want to put it inside layouts/partials. For example, I put my mathjax.html into the theme directory themes/mini/layouts/partials.

For Jekyll, add this line in your _includes/head.html before </head>:

{% include mathjax.html >}}

For Hugo, we would add the following line to layouts/partials/header.html before </head> in your theme’s layouts/partials/header.html.

{{ partial "mathjax.html" . }}

Now you can write in-line math equations in your markdown file like:

\\(f(x) = x^2\\)

or

$f(x) = x^2$

The above text will be render to: \(f(x) = x^2\)

If you are already using Mathjax v2 and wish to just convert it to v3, you may also try this configuration converter. There is a much more detailed guide but it may contain information unnecessary to average Hugo or Jekyll users.html) how to migrate from mathjax v2 to v3. The most useful resource is the official Mathjax documentation.