Common Issues · KaTeX

Be sure to include <!DOCTYPE html> at the top of your HTML file, as otherwise your browser will render in "quirks mode" which can cause KaTeX to sometimes render incorrectly. This header is needed even inside <iframe>s (which don't inherit the parent document's doctype).
Many Markdown preprocessors, such as the one that Jekyll and GitHub Pages use, have a "smart quotes" feature. This changes ' to ’ which is an issue for math containing primes, e.g. f'. This can be worked around by defining a single character macro which changes them back, e.g. {"’", "'"}.
KaTeX follows LaTeX's rendering of aligned and matrix environments unlike MathJax. When displaying fractions one above another in these vertical layouts there may not be enough space between rows for people who are used to MathJax's rendering. The distance between rows can be adjusted by using \\[0.1em] instead of the standard line separator distance.
KaTeX does not support the align environment because LaTeX doesn't support align in math mode. The aligned environment offers the same functionality but in math mode, so use that instead.
MathJax defines \color to be like \textcolor by default; set KaTeX's colorIsTextColor option to true for this behavior. KaTeX's default behavior matches MathJax with its color.js extension enabled.
Equivalents of MathJax \class, \cssId, and \style are \htmlClass, \htmlId, and \htmlStyle, respectively, to avoid ambiguity.
Some symbols are defined using macro instead of \DeclareMathSymbol or similar as in LaTeX. This may cause different behavior in expansion. They may expand into multiple tokens and be affected by \expandafter and \noexpand.

Troubleshooting

To check the stylesheet (katex.css) is properly loaded, add following code to anywhere in the document:

<style>
  .katex-version {display: none;}
  .katex-version::after {content:"0.10.2 or earlier";}
</style>
<span class="katex">
  <span class="katex-mathml">The KaTeX stylesheet is not loaded!</span>
  <span class="katex-version rule">KaTeX stylesheet version: </span>
</span>

If it is loaded properly, it'll show its version. Make sure its version matches the version of the JavaScript file (katex.js), which is defined in katex.version. If it is not loaded properly, it'll show:

The KaTeX stylesheet is not loaded!

CSS customization

KaTeX's CSS is customizable to some extent. For example, to make individual display equations scrollable horizontally:

.katex-display { overflow: auto hidden }

To allow line breaks in display equations (unlike LaTeX):

.katex-display > .katex { white-space: normal }
/* Add space between broken lines: */
.katex-display > .base { margin: 0.25em 0 }
/* Compensate by reducing space around display math */
.katex-display { margin: 0.5em 0; }