[ENH] Adding possibility for latex macros

[roiholtzman]

I write latex equations and I use some macros for that. When I was using org-roam-server it was using mathjax, and had a header which I could include latex macros.

I am wondering if there is a way to include latex macros in the rendering of org-roam-ui. I saw thanks to this post that KaTeX has a macros option which I think can do the trick.

The question is, can such a file can be supplied to org-roam-ui?

[tefkah]

Yes I think that should not be too hard to add!

[tefkah]

This has been added in the latest commit. The ref and eqref macros are implemented by default!

[roiholtzman]

How should one attach a file with the macros? What should be the structure of this file?

[tefkah]

Ah you would like to load a file of LaTeX macros. Could you show me a piece of this file?

At the moment you can set (org-roam-ui-latex-macros) to an alist of latex macros as

(setq org-roam-ui-latex-macros
             '(("\\something" . "\\textbf{#1}")))

So that when you write \something{word} it will be interpreted as \textbf{word} (i'm sure you know how latex macros work, not sure why im explaining that)

I think it should be possible to load a file of them, but that use-case seems pretty niche and I'm not sure how to tackle that effectively. (i.e. maybe you could try writing a function which reads that file and outputs such an alist, and share it here 😅 )

[roiholtzman]

Actually, that's great! Is this released? I can't wait to check it out:)

[tefkah]

Yes you should be able to use this now if you update to the latest version of org-roam-ui!

[roiholtzman]

I just checked this and this does not seem to work... This is my configuration

(use-package! org-roam-ui
  :after org-roam ;; or :after org
  ;;         normally we'd recommend hooking orui after org-roam, but since org-roam does not have
  ;;         a hookable mode anymore, you're advised to pick something yourself
  ;;         if you don't care about startup time, use
  ;;  :hook (after-init . org-roam-ui-mode)
  :config
  (setq org-roam-ui-sync-theme t
        org-roam-ui-follow t
        org-roam-ui-update-on-save t
        org-roam-ui-open-on-start t)
  (setq org-roam-ui-latex-macros
        '(("\\kk" . "\\textbf{kk}")
          ("\\vv" . "\\textbf{vv}")
          ("\\xx" . "\\textbf{xx}")
          )))

But still I see no rendering in org-roam-ui.

[stewmehr]

@roiholtzman I do not know if your issue still persists, but I set org-roam-ui-latex-macros in the :init section of my org-roam-ui configuration. Maybe this works better for you:

(use-package! org-roam-ui
  :after org-roam ;; or :after org
  ;;         normally we'd recommend hooking orui after org-roam, but since org-roam does not have
  ;;         a hookable mode anymore, you're advised to pick something yourself
  ;;         if you don't care about startup time, use
  ;;  :hook (after-init . org-roam-ui-mode)
  :init
  (setq org-roam-ui-latex-macros
        '(("\\kk" . "\\textbf{kk}")
          ("\\vv" . "\\textbf{vv}")
          ("\\xx" . "\\textbf{xx}")))
  :config
  (setq org-roam-ui-sync-theme t
        org-roam-ui-follow t
        org-roam-ui-update-on-save t
        org-roam-ui-open-on-start t))

We seem to hang out in the same niches of use cases ;) So I started to work on @ThomasFKJorna's suggestion of parsing custom macros from .tex file(s) into an alist.

This should not be too much of a challenge for "fragile" macros defined via \def and \newcommand.

However, more complex macros defined with the xparse package, e.g. via \NewDocumentCommand, are trickier beasts. In particular, I have some macros where expansion depends on the presence of a second optional argument (can be checked via \IfValueTF{#2}). I have opened a discussion on the KaTeX repo to ask if/how this can be handled; I can let you know once I hear back from the KaTeX devs.

[roiholtzman]

@hwesterholt Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately, this does not work for me. The macros still do not render well.

[leo-ackermann]

Hi! I don't know if this strategy can be exported to org-roam-ui (I hope so), but here is what I do when exporting org to html: simply use the dvipng backend for html. It creates images from the LaTeX formula, taking into account the LaTeX_HEADER of the file (which allows the use of preambule with a lot of macros), and places them in the html. Similar things can be done via dvisvg. Maybe it can be a track for org-roam-ui-latex-dvipng option ? Best,

Ps. Thank you a lot @.ThomasFKJorna for this amazing package :)