Build-time math rendering

[penelopeysm]

Description

Hello!

I've used Astro for a while now for some technical writing, and it's not too dissimilar from Quarto in that I'm writing in Markdown and letting Astro render it to HTML.

One of the features I really like about Astro is that by adding a couple of plugins, I can get all the LaTeX equations to be rendered at compile-time as SVGs, rather than the traditional way of including the MathJax library from a CDN and having the equations be rendered by the client's browser.

This leads to much snappier loading and also avoids the infamous jumping behaviour that MathJax rendering causes on equation-heavy pages.

Under the hood, the plugins perform a two-step code transformation: one from Markdown to generic math HTML, and one that turns this into actual equations using either KaTeX or MathJax. This is demonstrated in the plugin readme: https://github.com/remarkjs/remark-math

Is this something that can be accomplished with Quarto extensions? And is there any appetite for having this as a feature?

[cscheid]

Under the hood, the plugins perform a two-step code transformation: one from Markdown to generic math HTML

This is the "easy" part. You can achieve something like this in Quarto by changing the html-math-method option from Pandoc: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#math-rendering-in-html-1

The hard part (maybe not even possible) is to do the work on the output of Pandoc. Unfortunately, Lua filters are run before Pandoc's format-specific writer, so there's no natural extension point to use.

The best way I can imagine to do this is with a post-render script in a project, where the post-render script finds the .html files, parses them and calls whatever math renderer method you prefer.