Writing content with Markdown, LaTeX, and Shortcodes

Content can be written using Markdown, LaTeX math, and Hugo Shortcodes. Additionally, HTML may be used for advanced formatting. This article gives an overview of the most common formatting options.

Table of Contents

Sub-headings

## Heading 2
### Heading 3
#### Heading 4
##### Heading 5
###### Heading 6

Emphasis

Italics with *asterisks* or _underscores_.

Bold with **asterisks** or __underscores__.

Combined emphasis with **asterisks and _underscores_**.

Strikethrough with ~~two tildes~~.

Ordered lists

1. First item
2. Another item

Unordered lists

* First item
* Another item

Images

Images may be added to a page by placing them in your static/img/ folder and referencing them using one of the following two notations:

A general image:

![alternative text for search engines](/img/screenshot.png)

A numbered figure with caption:

{{< figure src="/img/screenshot.png" title="Figure Caption" >}}

Links

[I'm a link](https://www.google.com)
[A post]({{< ref "post/hi.md" >}})
[A publication]({{< ref "publication/hi.md" >}})
[A project]({{< ref "project/hi.md" >}})
[Another section]({{< relref "hi.md#who" >}})

To enable linking to a file, such as a PDF, first place the file in your static/files/ folder and then link to it using the following form:

{{% staticref "files/cv.pdf" "newtab" %}}Download my CV{{% /staticref %}}

The optional "newtab" argument for staticref will cause the link to be opened in a new tab.

Emojis

See the Emoji cheat sheet for available emoticons. The following serves as an example, but you should remove the spaces between each emoji name and pair of semicolons:

I : heart : Academic : smile :

I ❤️ Academic 😄

Blockquote

> This is a blockquote.

This is a blockquote.

Footnotes

I have more [^1] to say.

[^1]: Footnote example.

I have more ¹ to say.

Code highlighting

Pass the language of the code, such as python, as a parameter after three backticks:

```python
# Example of code highlighting
input_string_var = input("Enter some data: ")
print("You entered: {}".format(input_string_var))
```

Result:

# Example of code highlighting
input_string_var = input("Enter some data: ")
print("You entered: {}".format(input_string_var))

Highlighting options

The Academic theme uses highlight.js for source code highlighting, and highlighting is enabled by default for all pages. However, several configuration options are supported that allow finer-grained control over highlight.js.

The following table lists the supported options for configuring highlight.js, along with their expected type and a short description. A “yes” in the config.toml column means the value can be set globally in config.toml, and a “yes” in the preamble column means that the value can be set locally in a particular page’s preamble.

option	type	description	config.toml	preamble
highlight	boolean	enable/disable highlighting	yes	yes
highlight_languages	slice	choose additional languages	yes	yes
highlight_style	string	choose a highlighting style	yes	no

Option highlight

The highlight option allows enabling or disabling the inclusion of highlight.js, either globally or for a particular page. If the option is unset, it has the same effect as if you had specified highlight = true. That is, the highlight.js javascript and css files will be included in every page. If you’d like to only include highlight.js files on pages that actually require source code highlighting, you can set highlight = false in config.toml, and then override it by setting highlight = true in the preamble of any pages that require source code highlighting. Conversely, you could enable highlighting globally, and disable it locally for pages that do not require it. Here is a table that shows whether highlighting will be enabled for a page, based on the values of highlight set in config.toml and/or the page’s preamble.

config.toml	page preamble	highlighting enabled for page?
unset or true	unset or true	yes
unset or true	false	no
false	unset or false	no
false	true	yes

Option highlight_languages

The highlight_languages option allows you to specify additional languages that are supported by highlight.js, but are not considered “common” and therefore are not supported by default. For example, if you want source code highlighting for Go and clojure in all pages, set highlight_languages = ["go", "clojure"] in config.toml. If, on the other hand, you want to enable a language only for a specific page, you can set highlight_languages in that page’s preamble.

The highlight_languages options specified in config.toml and in a page’s preamble are additive. That is, if config.toml contains, highlight_languages = ["go"] and the page’s preamble contains highlight_languages = ["ocaml"], then javascript files for both go and ocaml will be included for that page.

If the highlight_languages option is set, then the corresponding javascript files will be served from the cdnjs server. To see a list of available languages, visit the cdnjs page and search for links with the word “languages”.

The highlight_languages option provides an easy and convenient way to include support for additional languages to be severed from a CDN. If serving unmodified files from cdnjs doesn’t meet your needs, you can include javascript files for additional language support via one of the methods described in the getting started guide.

Option highlight_style

The highlight_style option allows you to select an alternate css style for highlighted code. For example, if you wanted to use the solarized-dark style, you could set highlight_style = "solarized-dark" in config.toml.

If the highlight_style option is unset, the default is to use the file /css/highlight.min.css, either the one provided by the Academic theme, or else the one in your local static directory. The /css/highlight.min.css file provided by Academic is equivalent to the github style from highlight.js.

If the highlight_style option is set, then /css/highlight.min.css is ignored, and the corresponding css file will be served from the cdnjs server. To see a list of available styles, visit the cdnjs page and search for links with the word “styles”.

See the highlight.js demo page for examples of available styles.

The highlight_style option is only recognized when set in config.toml. Setting highlight_style in your page’s preamble has no effect.

Twitter tweet

To include a single tweet, pass the tweet’s ID from the tweet’s URL as parameter to the shortcode:

{{< tweet 666616452582129664 >}}

Youtube

{{< youtube w7Ft2ymGmfc >}}

Vimeo

{{< vimeo 146022717 >}}

GitHub gist

{{< gist USERNAME GIST-ID  >}}

Speaker Deck

{{< speakerdeck 4e8126e72d853c0060001f97 >}}

$\rm \LaTeX$ math

$$\left [ – \frac{\hbar^2}{2 m} \frac{\partial^2}{\partial x^2} + V \right ] \Psi = i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi$$

$$\left [ – \frac{\hbar^2}{2 m} \frac{\partial^2}{\partial x^2} + V \right ] \Psi = i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi$$

Alternatively, inline math can be written by wrapping the formula with only a single $:

This is inline: $\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{X}\boldsymbol\beta + \boldsymbol\varepsilon$

This is inline: $\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{X}\boldsymbol\beta + \boldsymbol\varepsilon$

Note that Markdown special characters need to be escaped with a backslash so they are treated as math rather than Markdown. For example, * and _ become \* and \_ respectively.

Multiline equations

The standard LaTeX line break consisting of 2 backslashes needs to be replaced with 6 backslashes:

$$f(k;p\_0^\*) = \begin{cases} p\_0^\* & \text{if }k=1, \\\\\\
1-p\_0^\* & \text {if }k=0.\end{cases}$$

$$f(k;p_0^*) = \begin{cases} p_0^* & \text{if }k=1, \\
1-p_0^* & \text {if }k=0.\end{cases}$$

Publication abstracts

As Hugo and Academic attempt to parse TOML, Markdown, and LaTeX content in the abstract, the following guidelines should be followed just for the publication abstract and abstract_short fields:

• escape each LaTeX backslash (\) with an extra backslash, yielding \\
• escape each LaTeX underscore (_) with two backslashes, yielding \\_

Hence, abstract = "${O(d_{\max})}$" becomes abstract = "${O(d\\_{\\max})}$".

Table

Code:

| Command           | Description                    |
| ------------------| ------------------------------ |
| `hugo`            | Build your website.            |
| `hugo serve -w`   | View your website.             |

Result:

Command	Description
hugo	Build your website.
hugo serve -w	View your website.

Alerts

Alerts are a useful feature that add side content such as tips, notes, or warnings to your articles. They are especially handy when writing educational tutorial-style articles. Use the corresponding shortcodes to enable alerts inside your content:

{{% alert note %}}
Here's a tip or note...
{{% /alert %}}

This will display the following note block:

{{% alert warning %}}
Here's some important information...
{{% /alert %}}

This will display the following warning block:

Table of Contents

A table of contents may be particularly useful for long posts or tutorial/documentation type content. Use the {{% toc %}} shortcode anywhere you wish within your Markdown content to automatically generate a table of contents.