[Discussion] Unicode preview?

[clason]

Here's a far-out question (and feel free to close if it's too far out): I'm using (neo)vim, a text-based editor, so the markdown-based LaTeX preview isn't really helpful for me. Would it be possible to (optionally, e.g., with a command line flag) offer unicode preview for equation hover? There are some converters out there that can convert LaTeX to unicode, e.g.,

• https://github.com/tomtung/latex2unicode
• https://github.com/vks/latex-to-unicode (this one is in Rust)
  Not sure how capable these are, though.

Or at least for the documentation of commands (e.g., α for \alpha)?

(On a related note, have you seen https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io? Looks like a TeX engine written in Rust, which could be useful for preview features in general.)

[or17191]

Hey,

I've started working on a PR for this issue, but I need some help.
The images are saved in a JSON file, so it seems that adding the Unicode representation of commands to that file is the right way to go. But, that file is not under version control, and I don't know how to update it. Does anyone know how to update that file?

Also, I've pushed the branch to here, and since I'm a rust and texlab novice I would appreciate your input.

[efoerster]

Thanks for your help. The data.json file is auto-generated with the help of a Python script. You should add the data to the script, we can then upload a new version. I think the best way to implement this is to add a glyph field to the Command class. If you need data, I suggest to look into the unimathsymbols.txt data set.

In the language server, we should place the glyph always in the detail field of the CompletionItem. This should simplify things greatly and VS Code users would benefit from this too.

[efoerster]

@or17191 We tested your code and it works fine. So, we merged it into the master.
We will push a new release soon.

[clason]

I'm closing this for now since the main issue (completion documentation for commands) is fixed, and anything beyond that doesn't seem reasonable at the moment.