An automated workflow for scientific writing on Medium

How to upload Markdown files to Medium while maintaining tables, syntax highlighting, math typesetting, and footnotes.

Image by https://unsplash.com/@jeswinthomas

Medium is an excellent platform for blogging and it has increasingly become a go-to source of knowledge on data science and other technical topics.

Unfortunately, though, the writing experience on Medium for scientific topics isn’t great: there’s no support for tables, code syntax highlighting, math typesetting, or footnotes — all pretty essential elements for many posts.

I’m not the first person to run into this issue, either. A few searches for keyword phrases like “medium math formula” demonstrate how widespread the issue really is:

• How to write mathematics on Medium, Writing Math (LaTeX) Formulas in Medium, and How to Embed Beautiful Math equations in Medium all describe multi-step workflows for including math typesetting. Essentially, you write your equations in other software, convert them to images, and then copy the images into your post.
• Undocumented Medium Formatting Tricks describes an even more convoluted process for including internally-linked footnotes: you have to inspect the HTML source of a post, copy name attributes, and then manually…