Markdown math support (Latex)

[Vagab]

Check for existing issues

• [X] 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: