Ask HN: What prompt do you use to get Claude to consistently render LaTeX?

3•TobyTheCamel•4h ago

I currently have subscriptions to both Claude and ChatGPT. I generally prefer the former but find I can't fully commit to it for my maths-heavy workload as it often struggles to correctly render LaTeX.

An example of this failed rendering is here [1]. If I use Claude for all of my work, I come across issues like this or worse at least once a day. Instead, I find it easier just to ask any maths questions to ChatGPT which seems to have a much more robust system for outputting LaTeX.

I would love to merge my subscriptions though, so I'm here to ask whether anyone has a system prompt that has been effective in guiding Claude towards producing valid LaTeX. I've tried a few prompts myself but struggled to find anything that it consistently followed.

[1] https://imgur.com/yzlluOA

Comments

verdverm•3h ago

Some things are just too hard for them to do reliably

ontouchstart•2h ago

LLMs only produce markdown [1], usually Math is wrapped with KaTeX [2]. The rendering happens in the Web UI. If some math failed to render, you can copy the code and paste to latex-sandbox [3] and fix yourself.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

[2] https://katex.org

[3] https://latex-sandbox.vercel.app

ontouchstart•2h ago

It seems that GitHub gist can renders some of \LaTeX, but not perfect.

https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/bcffb186a753c5b75522fc8...

Johnny_Bonk•2h ago

When you say consistently render what do you mean? Like without any sort of formatting issue? If thats the case I would lower your expectations a bit almost always as with any bit of copy editing regardless of using ai or not theres going to be issues to review. I have a claude skill using tectonic I believe and it works pretty well, and then I wrote hooks to make sure if certain things are going to be written it does it in a certain way.

jlongo78•1h ago

honestly the magic phrase ive found is "use aligned LaTeX delimiters and assume the renderer supports MathJax." that one line cuts 80% of the inconsistency.

also: put it in your CLAUDE.md, not the system prompt. Claude reads that per-session and it sticks way better than hoping your prompt survives context compression. learned that the hard way after losing formmating mid-session one too many times.

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