Better fallback when richest_mime is LaTeX

[piever]

Currently, when the richest mime is MIME"text/latex"(), the fallback rendering doesn't work very well, e.g.

julia> using WebIO, SymPy

julia> x = symbols("x");

julia> WebIO.render(x)
(div { setInnerHtml="<pre>\\begin{equation*}x\\end{equation*}</pre>" })

In the specific case of SymPy, one should rather do:

function WebIO.render(x::SymPy.SymbolicObject)
    str = stringmime(MIME"text/latex"(), x)
    lt = match(r"^\\begin{equation\*}(.*)\\end{equation\*}$", str)[1]
    WebIO.render(latex(lt))
end

I wonder what should be our policy, whether we should encourage package authors to implement this in their packages or if somehow we should figure out a good fallback when richest_mime is LaTeX and implement it here. In particular things are somewhat tricky as different packages use different delimiters, for example LaTeXStrings uses dollars whereas SymPy uses \begin{equation*}.

Ref: JuliaGizmos/Interact.jl#275

[twavv]

I don't think that trying to parse out the \begin{equation} is a reasonable thing to do. My suggestion would be to have it handled by SymPy (maybe via Requires.jl?).

[shashi]

I think we shouldn't try to mess around with LaTeX printing... However I think we should allow using LaTeX-able objects inside a wrapper in CSSUtil (it already has a latex function which loads KaTeX), and make this also work when a LaTeX-able object is interpolated into markdown (easy with CSSUtil).

[shashi]

Ah I see you used latex in your suggested fix. I would say for now we should not treat LaTeX as a richest_mime... In the old Interact (before WebIO) we used to render using the display_dict that IJulia produced -- which meant Jupyter would use its own mechanism to print and rerender LaTeX... But it was such a big hack.

[piever]

Maybe WebIO (or a low dependency package like KaTeX which I had created just to have a centralized way to load KaTeX javascript from a local file) could overload a to_katex_string function that transform whatever string they output into something that KaTeX can render?

[twavv]

Could you just add your fix to KaTeX.jl? It seems like something that's specific enough that it doesn't really belong in WebIO itself. Also, you wouldn't need to parse out the \begin{equation} if you did that (I think).

[piever]

There are two intertwined issues:

1. KaTeX (and its standard rendering function) do not take delimiters (they just want a single string that's the stuff between \begin{equation} or \end{equation}. There is an autorender.js extension that allows something like that but I'm having trouble getting it to work (I'd like things to work locally but somehow it complains if I try to use local katex.js, katex.css and autorender.js). I would actually figure out a way to run KaTeX from local things as the current set up has problem finding KaTeX fonts.
2. Once 1. is fixed and we have a clean way to parse complex LaTeX strings (like My formula is $F = m \cdot a$), we should still determine where we intercept the rendering pipeline. Maybe render(x::Any) could call render(x, richest_mime(x)) and KaTeX or InteractBase could overload that method with the correct widget.

I can open a PR in InteractBase to try this stuff out so we can discuss there (it also looks like I need some help as I'm getting a bit stuck on importing assets). PR opened: JuliaGizmos/InteractBase.jl#132

[twavv]

Sure. Maybe a separate render_mime method to make it clear that render_mime is the fallback when no render method is defined for the given type (i.e. if a render and render_mime are defined for a given type, render always takes precedence).

[twavv]

I'd also like to do #254 (remove render_internal) before this.

[pfitzseb]

FWIW, Juno handles this by only allowing LaTeX in Markdown, which makes everything pretty easy because Julia's MD parser already does the right conversions. I feel like this could be a sane policy for WebIO as well.

[piever]

Juno handles this by only allowing LaTeX in Markdown, which makes everything pretty easy because Julia's MD parser already does the right conversions.

Sounds like a good plan. Could you spell it out in more detail? Meaning, what would be an easy way to get the "inner part" of LaTeX equations with no delimiters and information whether it is "display mode" or "inline mode" from the markdown?

[pfitzseb]

IIRC I basically re-wrote Base's md-to-plaintext (or something) renderer to ouput Hiccup.Nodes here. Might make sense to pull that file out to somewhere more central, but WebIO could almost use that as-is, I think.

[shashi]

there's already code that can do this. It works too :) https://github.com/JuliaGizmos/CSSUtil.jl/blob/master/src/markdown.jl

[twavv]

What's the status of this?

[piever]

Now there is a package KaTeX.jl which implements a latex function to give you a self updating scope (that takes an observable of text as input). CSSUtil could depend on it to add LaTeX support in markdown blocks, but I don't think that has happened yet.