References for theorems and equations

Help
1

Hello fellow obsidian users,

I’m trying to use obsidian to use Obsidian to write mathematics documents. I am a researcher. My plan is using Obsidian to save short proofs, ongoing arguments, and in general unfinished ideas that require more work and that don’t deserve a whole .tex document yet.

I am having trouble with theorem environments and equation numberings and things that LaTeX does by default.

If there is some fellow mathematician around please let me know how you did it. I got really excited about using Obsidian for research (instead of creating a new overleaf project to save a one-page valuable proof every time), but I’m hitting a wall here.

What I’m trying to do

I am looking my equations to be automatically numbered (instead of doing it manually with \tag{number}). The same for theorems. Ideally, in such a way that I wan write \label{label of the thing} and then somewhere else I can write \ref{label of the thing} and shows the reference.

Clickable links is not essential. If the thing gets automatically numbered as 1'' and then \ref{label of the thing} shows that number 1’', that is enough to me. Also, I don’t need labels to work across the vault or different .md documents. If this can be done to work inside every individual .md file then that is enough to me.

Things I have tried

I tried to install the plugin " LaTeX-like Theorem & Equation Referencer for Obsidian", but it fails. It says “Failed to load plugin “math-booster””. I read that this may be related to the fact that my vault is in a dropbox folder.

I also tried other plugins but none seems to solve this issue.

2

The plugin should allow you to do this, it looks like you may just be missing the dependencies for the plugin, you’ll need MathLinks plugin as well.

It just seems it’s had issues for a while that have gone unresolved, specifically with loading and dependencies, so if it goes beyond that you’ll need to go to the plugin repo.

The repo can be found here.

You could post your report related to it failing there as an issue, I’ve seen others in there mentioning using BRAT to go back to 2.14 which worked for them.

3

i don’t recall where i found this solution for the “Failed to load plugin ‘math-booster’” issue, but: in addition to the LaTeX-like ... and MathLinks plugins, install also the Lazy Plugin Loader plugin. set MathLinks to instant and LaTeX-like ... to a short delay. i think this is everything necessary to get it to work.

i must say though that there are some aspects of how equation references are treated with these plugins that i’m not a huge fan of. in particular, i wish it handled cross-file references better.

for theorems, one method that i have quite liked is to use callouts. for this it’s almost essential to also use the Better Math in Callouts & Blockquotes community plugin (by the same author as LaTeX-like ...).