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quarto-dev / quarto-cli

Open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc.
https://quarto.org
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Suggestion: Add builtin support for SI unit formatting #1708

Open tgross35 opened 2 years ago

tgross35 commented 2 years ago

Hey everyone,

Has there been discussion about adding some sort of SI unit formatting to quartio, similar to what siunitx allows for LaTeX?

This sort of thing is quite helpful when working with derived SI units, or prefixes that aren't found on latin keyboards. siunitx (documentation here) handles this in LaTeX, and it would be nice to somehow bring this functionality over.

siunitx ensures that the units are formatted consistently, with a required nonbreaking space between number and unit. It also has some nice features for things like formatting angles, lists, and ranges. As examples, \qty{30}{\uA} is rendered as "30 µA", \qty{70}{\Mohm\per\um} as "70 MΩ µm^-1" (with the correct exponent of course), \ang{180} as "180°" , or \qtyrange{0.15}{30}{\MHz} as "0.15 MHz to 30 MHz. (There are a lot more examples in the PDF documentation linked above).

Something like this would be a very nice fit for Quarto's use in scientific documentation.

GeorgRamer commented 1 month ago

This is IMHO one of the most important missing features in quarto considering its intended target application of scientific writing. There are some solutions that cover some use cases, but they tie the qmd file to a specific subset of target document types.

mcanouil commented 1 month ago

You can add support for that using what the format allows:

Note that the Math "pre-processing" is done by Pandoc, then the tools (Typst, $\LaTeX$, MathJax, KaTeX, etc.). Not all supports this and in the same way. None of them supports by default this, meaning users have to configure those tools if they need that feature.

GeorgRamer commented 1 month ago

Right, that is the current state of affairs.

I get your point that target formats also do not have a "default" way of representing SI units, which makes having such a "default" representation in quarto even more challenging.

GeorgRamer commented 1 month ago

I created a short code extension that covers many of my use cases. It is decidedly less powerful than siunitx, but I'd guess it covers many use cases. It can be found here: https://github.com/GeorgRamer/si