iWork gets LaTeX equation editing

By Teddy Svoronos

In April of last year, Apple released an update for Pages that supported rendering equations entered using LaTeX or MathML. I was really impressed that Apple chose to support not one but two standards for entering equations1, but was pretty bummed to learn that equation rendering was specific to Pages.

Today that changed. All three iWork apps now support equation rendering (even Numbers!). This is a big, big deal for me; it’ll be a huge timesaver2 and enable for much richer math-based animations in my presentations.

If you combine this with handwriting apps like MyScript Nebo, you can hand draw equations, copy them as LaTeX code, and paste them right into your iWork document.

On a different note, iWork on iOS is really growing up. Keynote now supports the editing and creation of paragraph styles and master slide layouts. I still work with Keynote most efficiently on MacOS, especially when editing animations in bulk, but the iOS apps are becoming more and more self-sufficient with each update.


  1. Especially in comparison to Microsoft’s equation syntax, which is just close enough to LaTeX to be infuriating to use. 

  2. I used to create equations in a Pages document, then pasted them into Keynote as images. It worked, but it was kludgy as heck.