Markdown in Latex blocks is still active

[liviu-]

Hi,

In a Jupyter notebook cell if I want to add a block equation as follows:

$$ a^* = hello $$

hello appears italic while editing text due to the star, even if it was part of the Latex syntax. If I just do $a^* = hello$ (i.e. inline Latex), hello does not appear italic anymore. Is this the intended behaviour?

Screenshot:

(I also tried a^{*} but the behaviour is the same.)

Using Jupyter 4.1.1

Also, thanks for the great project! 😛

[takluyver]

The highlighting while you're editing markdown is provided by Codemirror's markdown mode, which doesn't know about the $math$ bits, as that's an ad hoc extension to markdown syntax. When you render the cell, it should show up correctly. So it's not exactly intended behaviour, but it's a limitation we know about.

Someone may be able to write an extended Markdown mode for Codemirror which knew about this syntax. I think we'd be happy to include the code if someone did that, but it's not high on our priority list.

[liviu-]

I see -- many thanks for your quick response!

[joined]

It looks like the extension @takluyver is talking about is already in use: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/blob/666ecbf35c3310335a3c8c182e8f53441c991c14/notebook/static/notebook/js/codemirror-ipythongfm.js

In the extension both $ and $$ are declared as delimiters. The problem, as the comment in the code says, seems to be that defining $ as a delimiter for the LaTeX mode causes the $$ to be interpreted as two consecutive $ delimiters instead of a single $$ one.

I will investigate the possibility of a workaround.