Overview

Many STEM classes specifically may have materials in LaTeX due to the ease of presenting quantitative/mathematical information. However, adding these material on Canvas in a native, easy to access, universally available way can be challenging. Most of us would opt to include this material as links to the pdfs produced, which is not accessible.

Canvas, thankfully, offers the ability to create Pages based on html code. Hence, our goal here is to find an easy way to convert our LaTeX code to html code and then use that in Canvas to produce easy-to-access websites with all of our material.

How to add html code on Canvas

This is easier: first, create a new Page on Canvas. Then, select the html code option on the lower right part of the screen:
The Canvas view of creating a new page showing the HTML code button in the lower right part of the interface.
Clicking on it opens the HTML code editor for us. It should be empty (for a new page) or include the html code corresponding to your formatting (for an already existing page).

How to convert LaTeX to html code

A fantastic tool for converting between document formats is Pandoc. We will need a Pandoc installation for this next step to work, so follow the instructions here depending on your operating system. Once we have Pandoc, we can use the following executable to convert our LaTeX material to accessible html pages: LaTeX2Canvas

Once you download the package, uncompress it to the location of your choice. Then, copy the LaTeX file you aim to convert. Say its full filename is my_material.tex.
Its usage is as follows: LaTeX2Canvas.sh my_material
Once it is executed, there will be a file named my_material.html.
Finally, open the file (prefer to right-click and then select Edit or Open With a text editor rather than double-clicking). This should allow you to copy the whole contents of the file and then paste them in the HTML editor in Canvas.

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