Pandoc rules regarding LaTeX not followed on R blogdown hugo themes

Question

I can create a new blogdown site utilizing the default hugo-lithium theme and the text statement below will not render as a LaTeX equation, which is the behavior I expect.

An amount between $5 and $10.

Pandoc's manual explains the reason why, which I'll paste below with a bold emphasis:

Anything between two $ characters will be treated as TeX math. The opening $ must have a non-space character immediately to its right, while the closing $ must have a non-space character immediately to its left, and must not be followed immediately by a digit. Thus, $20,000 and $30,000 won’t parse as math. If for some reason you need to enclose text in literal $ characters, backslash-escape them and they won’t be treated as math delimiters.

HOWEVER, I can change to other Hugo themes (e.g. hugo-theme-codex) and this exact same text block renders improperly whenever I include math: true in my YAML.

An amount between $5 and $10. ends up displaying as:

Why is LaTeX invoked, when Pandoc is supposed to follow the rule I quoted above? How can I use "other" hugo themes, still use LaTeX math equations, and have Pandoc follow it's own rules? Escaping the $ unfortunately doesn't do anything, and displays the same result as the un-escaped version.

# Doesn't work
An amount between \$5 and \$10.

Getting in on the double slash escape action doesn't seem to work either:

# Doesn't work
An amount between \\$5 and \\$10.

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And for those wondering - the last two questions have been answered, 1, 2, and if this question is answered this should be the end of this three part story.

Corruption

What version of pandoc are you using? – Bohun

@Bohun rmarkdown::pandoc_version() yields '2.7.3' which is about a year old. – Corruption

Answer 1

First create the following file:

/your-blogdown-site/themes/hugo-theme-codex/layouts/partials/math.html

Then add this to the body of math.html that you just created:

<script src="//yihui.org/js/math-code.js"></script>
<script async
src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.5/MathJax.js?config=TeX-MML-AM_CHTML">
</script>

Only MathJax release 2.7.5 seems to work right.

The blogdown book templates section is a good source of reading material for this sort of thing. You must include math: true in your YAML to display LaTeX math equations utilizing this method.

Corruption