July 14, 2026
Math drama, now rendering faster
Jektex 0.2.0 – A Jekyll plugin for LaTeX rendering is now ~10x faster
Math nerds are cheering after one tiny change made formula-heavy sites feel absurdly fast
TLDR: Jektex 0.2.0 makes math-heavy Jekyll sites build about 10 times faster by processing many formulas at once instead of one by one. The community reaction is basically stunned applause, with commenters treating the discovery of the real slowdown like the reveal of a surprise villain.
A niche website tool just got a glow-up, and the people who care about it are acting like they witnessed a small miracle. Jektex is a plugin for Jekyll, a static site generator that lets bloggers and documentation writers show math formulas on their pages without stuffing readers’ browsers with extra JavaScript. The flashy update: version 0.2.0 is reportedly about 10x faster, which in normal-person terms means pages packed with equations no longer make site builds crawl.
But the real tea is in the reaction. Developer yagarea basically dropped the plot twist: the math rendering wasn’t the main problem at all — the slowdown came from repeatedly making KaTeX, the formula-display engine, do one formula at a time from Ruby. The fix? Round up all the formulas on a page and process them in one big batch. On the creator’s own blog, around 5,000 formulas went from a painful build to about 7 seconds uncached, which is the kind of stat that makes comment sections sit up straight.
The strongest vibe from the community is a mix of “finally!” and “wait, that was the bottleneck the whole time?” There’s also quiet delight over the plugin keeping formulas out of code blocks, handling weird HTML edge cases, and caching smartly so old settings don’t poison new builds. The humor writes itself: this is basically a story where the equations were innocent, and the real villain was the endless back-and-forth between tools. For math-heavy bloggers, that’s not just an update — it’s revenge arc material.
Key Points
- •Jektex 0.2.0 is a Jekyll plugin for server-side LaTeX rendering with caching and macro support.
- •The plugin works without client-side JavaScript and is described as compatible with normal Jekyll workflow and structure.
- •Jektex supports both kramdown math notation and LaTeX math mode notation.
- •It can render formulas inside raw HTML blocks that kramdown normally leaves unprocessed, while skipping tags such as code, pre, and script.
- •Configuration is managed through `_config.yml`, with invalid options falling back to defaults and disk caching enabled by default unless disabled.