Quantities via siunitx

[jan-david-fischbach]

Hey @rowanc1 @stevejpurves @fwkoch,
I usually make heavy use of the \qty{}{} command when editing my scientific documents in LaTeX. What would be the best way to support a similar feature (probably role?¹) in myst. Would it make sense to extend the mdast spec to include some type: quantity which is then expressed using siunitx in .tex output. In the web version we could implement a popover, that allows the interactive conversion to other units or similar.

Footnotes

1. I am not sure, whether roles can support multiple arguments (amount and unit). Furthermore in LaTeX the qty command can also be used in Math environments, which would be nice, to maintain. ↩

[agoose77]

I believe that we already have support for siunits in the AST: #354

The next step is formalising a MyST syntax to parse. @rowanc1 authored that PR, IIRC.

[jan-david-fischbach]

Ah ok, didn't see that...

[rowanc1]

Yes! We can parse it from latex pretty well, and it does have a representation in the AST, and the UI is there. The MyST role is not yet defined: we need to figure out the MyST syntax, and probably a few other things. If you are interested in doing a bit of work on that I can set up an issue with pointers!

There is an example here (parsed from latex) of a published MyST article that has units in figure 4:
https://journal.physiomeproject.org/articles/S000014#fig-fig4
There is alt-text that shows up over the units! I feel like we can actually do a really good job on accessibility and other things in this -- all of which is lost when getting a printed PDF!

[jan-david-fischbach]

Jeah, that looks really good!

I have also thought about simple conversions (eg. inches to metric) but that is rather gimmicky.

I will put some time in to create the MyST syntax, if that is desired.

Regards JD

[rowanc1]

Yeah, I like the idea of those conversions, but at the very least having this be more machine readable and accessible is a huge step on its own!

Awesome, that would be great if you could open an issue suggesting a syntax we can pull in a few more people to think on it after that. Thanks for your help!! 🚀

[jan-david-fischbach]

Opened #545