Markdown math support (Latex)

[Vagab]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

Would be cool if markdown preview rendered math as well

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

No response

[ferntheplant]

It seems like this would be very non-trivial to implement. Zed uses its own customer renderer so they'd have to make a LaTeX renderer that produces something like MathElement. I didn't dig super deep into that side of the equation but think that once that is done it would be relatively easy to regex match for $ enclosed text and render MathElement as part of the render_markdown_text sequence that currently calculates highlights and generates interactive text elements for hyperlinks.

[bbb651]

pulldown-cmark added support for it so should be easy on the parsing front. Rendering Layout is a lot more complicated, the only potentially useful reference I've found is typst's implementation.

[bitfield]

Just to give an idea of what this might look like (screenshot from the VS Code Markdown Preview extension).

The markup:

1.11 Neptunium. In the fall of 2002, a group of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory determined 
that the critical mass of neptunium-237 is about 60 kg. The critical mass of a fissionable material is the 
minimum amount that must be brought together to start a chain reaction. This element has a density of 
19.5 g/cm^3. What would be the radius of a sphere of this material that has a critical mass?

Volume of the critical sphere $$ V_{crit} = 60,000 / 19.5 = 3077cm^3 = \frac{4\pi r^3}{3} $$

So

$$ R_{crit} = \sqrt[3]{\frac{3 \times 3077}{4 \pi}} = 9cm \; ✅ $$

Rendering:

[bersace]

codestral produce markdown math. Very hard to read in assistant panel:

[probably-neb]

This is definitely a neat idea, but as @ferntheplant probably non-trivial to implement given our custom renderer.

I'd definitely be interested in seeing this in the markdown renderer, especially as we get more support for Jupyter notebooks that would benefit from this kind of thing.

In order to keep track of this i'm going to convert this to a discussion because we've decided to move feature/enhancement requests there so it will be more likely someone from the team will see it there when looking for new features to add