# LaTex MarkUp - align equations

I'm very elated by the fact that it has LaTeX support. I would like to know whether the \begin{align} \end{align} environment could be used, because it looks very good since the equations are aligned. If not how can i make this LaTeX command look better?

\begin{align*}
\int \frac{1}{(2x^{2}+4x-2)^{-\frac{3}{2}}} \ \textrm{dx} &= \frac{\sqrt{2}}{8} \int\frac{\sec{t} \cdot \tan{t}}{\tan^{3}{t}} \ \textrm{dt} \\\ &= \frac{\sqrt{2}}{8} \int\frac{\cos{t}}{\sin^{2}{t}} \ \textrm{dt}
\end{align*}

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For anyone else wondering what the heck LaTeX is, for ref: en.support.wordpress.com/latex – t31os Feb 17 '11 at 15:12
To be clear, are you talking about a blog hosted at WordPress.com, or one you host yourself? You can edit your question and add wordpress.com as a tag to make this clear. – Jan Fabry Feb 17 '11 at 16:05
re tagged the question because it had nothing to do with category – Bainternet Feb 17 '11 at 16:27

As mentioned, WordPress does not provide general LaTeX support, but usually only mathmode support. Thus you have to use something that works from within mathmode, and not its own environemnt. In this case, there is a very useful one called 'aligned' (with the 'ed' at the end). To render the above in your default WordPress.com LaTeX (or even in MathJax-LaTeX plug-in), use the following code:

latex \begin{aligned} \int \frac{1}{(2x^{2}+4x-2)^{-\frac{3}{2}}} \ \textrm{dx} &= \frac{\sqrt{2}}{8} \int\frac{\sec{t} \cdot \tan{t}}{\tan^{3}{t}} \ \textrm{dt} \\ &= \frac{\sqrt{2}}{8} \int\frac{\cos{t}}{\sin^{2}{t}} \ \textrm{dt} \end{aligned}

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This was the easiest solution for me. Thanks! – JohnJamesSmith Jul 19 '12 at 3:57

From the link t31os has provided you can clearly see that:

One thing to keep in mind is that WordPress puts all of your \LaTeX code inside a \LaTeX math environment. If you try to use \LaTeX that doesn’t work inside the math environment (such as \begin{align} ... \end{align}), you will get an error.

so no you can't but, you can use Youngwhan's Simple Latex plugin that has an align option.

## Update

following Jan's comment you can use google chart api

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chl=\begin{align*}%20\int%20\frac{1}{%282x^{2}+4x-2%29^{-\frac{3}{2}}}%20\%20\textrm{dx}%20&=%20\frac{\sqrt{2}}{8}%20\int\frac{\sec{t}%20\cdot%20\tan{t}}{\tan^{3}{t}}%20\%20\textrm{dt}%20\\%20&=%20\frac{\sqrt{2}}{8}%20\int\frac{\cos{t}}{\sin^{2}{t}}%20\%20\textrm{dt}%20\end{align*}


and isert it as the img src.

Hope this helps

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Of course, if you are on WordPress.com you won't be able to use this plugin. But I think there are other sites that allow you to create images from LaTeX code, maybe if they support this syntax it would be possible to include those images? – Jan Fabry Feb 17 '11 at 16:29
@Jan - yep there are some apis for that like google chart api, i updated the answer – Bainternet Feb 17 '11 at 16:36
@בניית אתרים: That image has "align" in it, so I think Google also ignores it. A related question on Stack Overflow lists many alternatives, at least one of them supports this syntax. – Jan Fabry Feb 17 '11 at 16:44
@jan : it ignores it but once you have an image you can align using html/cds or am i missing the point? – Bainternet Feb 17 '11 at 16:54

This would work out of the box with the QuickLaTeX plugin (which I believe is only available for self-hosted WP blogs so I'm not sure this applies to the OP). The input

[+preamble]\usepackage{amsmath}[/preamble] \begin{align*} \int \frac{1}{(2x^{2}+4x-2)^{-\frac{3}{2}}} \textrm{d}x &= \frac{\sqrt{2}}{8} \int\frac{\sec{t} \cdot \tan{t}}{\tan^{3}{t}} \textrm{d}t \\ &= \frac{\sqrt{2}}{8} \int\frac{\cos{t}}{\sin^{2}{t}} \textrm{d}t \end{align*}


gives me on my blog

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Actually just native LaTeX works with QuickLaTeX: \begin{align*} ... \end{align*}. No need for [latex] nor [preamble] tags. – Pavel Holoborodko Dec 24 '15 at 1:57