Latex Suite for Obsidian

16 March 2025

Just giving a quick shoutout to my new favourite Obsidian plugin, Latex Suite.

As an engineering student, I take many notes involving mathematical formulas. I did this a bunch last year, using the built-in LaTeX support in Obsidian. Thanks to Markdown, it was quite easy, and I could write equations both inline or display math mode. Learning LaTeX syntax wasn't too hard either, although it sometimes got a bit annoying to type everything out, especially when dealing with a lot of fractions (\frac{}{}).

A few weeks ago I discovered the powers of Latex Suite, and it's taken my maths note-taking to the next level. It provides user-customisable text snippets, basically allowing you to type out equations "more naturally" and it'll automatically format it with proper LaTeX syntax.

For example, if you wanted to write the fraction 1/2, you would normally have to type:

\frac{1}{2}

But with Latex Suite enabled, all you gotta type is

1/2

and the plugin with take of the rest.

Another example: if you want to type x squared, normally you would type

x^{2}

But thanks to this plugin, you just need to type

xsr

These are just a couple examples of the many snippets Latex Suite has by default. It comes with over 100 pre-configured snippets covering all the basic maths functions, operators and symbols. The neat thing is that the plugin is entirely customisable, so you can edit all the snippets or create your own to suit what works for you. It's also not limited to LaTeX/maths so you can use it to make text snippets for... anything.

This plugin allows me to type out complex equations much faster than before, which is obviously super useful when following along a lecture. I've been using it for two weeks at this point and I don't think I could go back to typing out LaTeX manually. It's become an indispensable tool in my note-taking workflow.

The GitHub repository for the plugin can be found here. It was inspired by Gilles Castel's setup using UltiSnips, which is definitely worth reading about.