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

1 day 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

6 comments

TobyTheCamel

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mdritch  14 hours ago

I do this with claude frequently. The best tactic I have found is to include a finished file as a "style guide" alongside your content prompt. To find an appropriate style guide for your subject matter, find paper on the arxiv that covers similar material and click the "TeX Source" link.

Johnny_Bonk  1 day 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  1 day 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.