Better interoperability when writing math (LaTeX)

[Szabolcs Horvát]

Hello everyone,

I use TiddlyWiki with the KaTeX plugin.  Unfortunately, the writing experience is not as good as with some other tools, and the copy/paste interoperability is bad.

It would be very useful to have the following features:

 - Single-$ delimiters for inline math. Keep $$ for display math only.

 - Make math work in MarkDown tiddlers.

Advantages:

1. Writing without breaking one's flow. $$ is a pain to type if it has to be typed multiple times in each sentence. Example:

"There are no three integers $$a$$, $$b$$ and $$c$$ so that $$a^n + b^n = c^n$$ for any integer $$n$$ greater than 2."

Such sentences, with multiple tiny bits of math, are common when writing mathematical prose. Those who only use LaTeX occasionally may not immediately see it, but single-$ is a significant improvement over double-$$ when writing serious math.  Unfortunately, most people who implement tools have a programming background and only use math occasionally. Most people who write a lot of math don't have the expertise to implement and maintain such tools.

2. Easy copy-pasting between different systems.

I would like to be able to directly paste text from tiddlers to a LaTeX document, or to Markdown documents. Mathematical text will have little formatting (such as bold or italic), but a lot of LaTeX-snippets.  If the math delimiters matched normal LaTeX, pasting would be possible with minimal modifications. 

Tools that people who work with math actually use have more-or-less standardized on a LaTeX-compatible notation in Markdown documents. Consider Math.StackExchange, MathOverflow, Jupyter Notebooks, Markdown-Preview-Plus plugin for Atom, Sage Math, etc.

Can these features please be considered?  They would make TiddlyWiki a much more viable tool for researchers and mathematicians. I think it is a great way to plan a paper, but I would like to be able to type faster (without breaking by flow due to all the $$-delimiters) and I would like to be able to paste from the tiddlers to the final paper, as well as from other notes into tiddlers, without having to make significant modifications every time.

Szabolcs

[AndrewMc]

A small thing to note is that some people will use $ for their currency symbol. If you make single-$ a delimiter, then writing about money is made more difficult.

I have this issue in a TWc that contains a lot of mathematical notation. I ended up having to define "\dollar" as a dollar sign, $, so that I could write a single dollar sign using Latex as "$\dollar$".

Cheers

Andrew Mc

[Szabolcs Horvát]

Indeed, there is a compromise here, but I would call it a minor one.

The systems I mentioned (including LaTeX itself) allow including a dollar sign using \$, which is much shorter and simpler than $\dollar$.

While I admit that the following is a guess, I'd expect most people who need advanced math don't need $ signs in the same TiddlyWiki (or don't need to type them nearly as often as math).

Let me emphasize something from my original post once again: Sadly, most people who need this can't implement it, and most who can don't need it. With open source projects, unfortunately that often means that the feature just doesn't get implemented.  Or if it does, it might be in an unmaintained unofficial patch that one can't count on in the long term.

This is why I am asking here, hoping that TW will gain this as an official feature that is easy to set up and will work even years from now.

[Rahul Kashyap]

Dear TW users,

Has there been any improvement over this or, any suggestions for workaround for the time being. 

I would like to second the @Szabolcs' thoughts and request. I like tiddlywiki a lot and its emphasis on connectivity of different ideas. With recent addition of bibtex file parser and excellent efforts by Mohammad in developing a bibtex parser and reference manager ( and earlier Shiraz plugin), TW is going to become one of the favorite tool for anyone seriously researching into anything. 

However, just like @Szabolcs, I feel the need to include easy-to-write and larger inclusion of latex functions. I noticed a very hopeful plugin in this direction -- https://github.com/anstosa/tw5-markdown . Here a markdown commands will be given preference over tiddlywiki commands (TW commands are fallback) if the Type field of any tiddler has the value "text/x-markdown" which means that something like that could be done with latex (perhaps by adding the latex engine in the back). One can still use normal tiddlers in the same tiddlywiki for multiple purpose for which we like TW. 

In another discussion I have posted a sample course material that I have prepared in TW and has gotten at least a few god response -- https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/RVaAXwN3bQ8/m/7PClhZLGDAAJ  

Best,

Rahul