[Feature Request] Support solving within latex expressions

[Explosion-Scratch]

I have lots of notes which have something like:

• 2.00 L of water is at 20.0 °C. If you raise its temperature to 90.0 °C, by how much will its volume expand?
  • $\triangle V = (2.14e-5)270$

It would be amazing if this plugin would solve things within the '$'s, evaluating that as '(2.14*e-5)270' =114.40

Also this would solve issues like * being used as italic formatting in obsidian

[LiamRiddell]

Thanks a lot for this cool idea 🌟. I totally get where you're coming from, wanting to solve equations right inside your notes. It sounds super convenient!

However, after giving it some thought, I realized that integrating this feature is quite a handful. The thing with TeX/LaTeX is that it's awesome for showing off math equations in a neat format, but it's not really built for crunching numbers. Parsing and computing LaTeX directly in the plugin would be like opening a whole new can of worms, given how complex LaTeX syntax can get. Also, there's this tricky part where LaTeX uses symbols like '*' for its formatting magic, which could get misread as something else if we start doing math with them.

So, while I love the idea, I think it's a bit out of reach for this plugin. That said, I'm all ears for other suggestions to make the plugin better within its main goals. Keep those ideas coming!

---

On a side note, I've implemented a fix for *, you can escape it using \* or you can use letter x or the word multiply.

[Explosion-Scratch]

@LiamRiddell Not parsing and evaluating LaTeX per se, but just ignoring the $ and splitting on =. In the example above this would split by equals to get (2.14*e-5)270$, then remove the trailing $, then evaluate that.

[LiamRiddell]

@LiamRiddell Not parsing and evaluating LaTeX per se, but just ignoring the $ and splitting on =. In the example above this would split by equals to get (2.14*e-5)270$, then remove the trailing $, then evaluate that.

Damn, my apologies! I'll reopen the issue. I can take a look at this and see what I can do. Thank you for correcting me 😃

[Explosion-Scratch]

All good! A cool thing that I might PR in the future would be to convert LaTeX to ASCIIMath then solve that

[LiamRiddell]

That sounds interesting. I do have an initial draft of the community providers in the code which allows another Obsidian Plugin to define custom providers. It's currently un-documented in early stages. It could also be a good project for that too!

[LiamRiddell]

@Explosion-Scratch The only issue I initially see in the example $\triangle V = (2.14e-5)270$ is that the multiplication is implicit. However, Solve would require this to be an explicit definition with the symbol e.g. $\triangle V = (2.14e-5)*270$. This would probably be a pain for you use case?

Implicit:

Explicit:

[Explosion-Scratch]

@LiamRiddell You could use https://github.com/Crownie/latex-to-js/blob/e878ba070936388988eb245a4d031125df68e788/latex-to-js.js