Math Typesetting in Medium
I find the the Medium publishing platform really frustrating. It supports only a hyper-minimal set of formatting possibilities, which forbid you the ability to:
- Center/Justify/Align text
- Have more than one space at the end of a sentence
- Indent a paragraph
- Embed Javascript
I still use it because its weaknesses are also its largest strengths. From its minimalism comes a very clean UI and with a very tight aesthetic. The spartan formatting pallet isn’t really a deal breaker for most writing, as we don’t really need “House of Leaves” style formatting for the day-to-day. That said, it limits the sorts of poetry one can compose and it makes science writing pretty much impossible.
Today I became pretty annoyed with this this whole situation, and I decided to do something about it. My original intention was to make something to synchronize my local notebooks (markdown/html) in the medium platform, and allow for editing to flow forwards/backwards between the two platforms. But…
The Medium API is write-only.
When I say write-only, I mean that you actually can’t even use it to update an article or see what articles you have written! C’mon guys.
That said at the end of this all, I did have a thing that let you typeset and upload equations. Every so often you really need to say something like
or explain that the way to calculate inductance is given by
Given I don’t want to host my own website and get all the annoying CSS right for every platform/browser, so I guess this is an upgrade.
The code is freely available, and comes with a command line tool which:
- Reads a markdown file with embedded LaTeX.
- Generates
.pngfile graphics - Uploads the images to Medium
- Replaces the LaTeX in the markdown document with the image links
- Uploads it all as a draft to your medium account
Its incomplete, overly simple, and a bit hacky, but hey:
Enjoy.
