#katex

I guess we're boring

haha

well

There are a lot of bots

I should go to bed

hello everyone

kevinb7: Hello!

Thanks for all of your contributions!

You're welcome. This project is a breathe of fresh air... I found the MathJax codebase very difficult to work with.

Have you worked on it before?

I was doing some debugging, trying to figure out why it wasn't loading some its .js files where it stores all the metrics

Haha. Yes, MathJax's loading is kinda scary

I mostly wanted to talk to you about coming up with a roadmap of what we want to get done. You've been mostly working on stuff from the issues, which is great. There's some larger features I'd like to support some time in the future, and there's some features that we might not want to support, so I just wanted to make sure we're on the same page.

it's also bad for performance :(

for sure... I don't want to be going off in some other direction or I'll never get any PRs merged :)

:) Yep

Right now, our biggest feature goal is to add environments, with \begin and \end

However, I'd love to see some of the smaller features get added in the meantime

We're also concerned with feature bloat and so we're unsure about adding some of the weird MathJax features that people depend on

For example, I'm still unsure about the CSS attributes stuff

I'd also like to come up with a good way to do macros and extensions

macros being user-defined functions (not sure whether that's something inline like \def or something you pass in as a configuration)

and extensions being extra files you load in that add features (like I'd be fine with the \cssId stuff as long as it's not part of the base KaTeX distribution)

I think macros via \def, \newcommand, etc. are going to require big changes to the parser

Yes, I agree as well

the biggest problem I see right now with trying to implement \def in all its glory is that we're lexing as we parse

The TeX way of it is doing something more like plain text replacement, which I'd be in favor of instead of messing with post-parsing

So, if we parse a macro, we replace the text of the input and then restart the parsing from the beginning

a pre-parsing step where we pull out all defs? that should work as well, we'll have to take care with the position we report in the error messages

restart from the beginning of the macro, I mean

Hmm

I'm still unsure about adding \def in all its glory inline

It seems like something ripe for abuse

I guess we could have a flag to disable it or something

MathJax supports something where you can define macros externally and provide a configuration with them in it, and it uses them as you parse

the nice thing about splitting lexer and the parser is that we could have a stack of tokens that we could manipulate... replacing macros and push the tokens from the macro's definition on to the stack

It's hard to do lexing beforehand because some of the tokens look different

I think I would rather make people define macros/commands in JS in a way that doesn't let you manipulate the token stack at will

if that's possible

like CSS colors are not lexable unless you know they come after \color

Yes, I think I would like that too

I think we'll probably have to implement \def sometime also though

hmm.. but CSS colors have a pretty well defined pattern and you could regex the whole thing at once and then break it down later

(sorry, getting lunch)

Yeah, I suppose

starting with macros defined outside of the token stream is probably a good idea because it will give people something they can use sooner and it won't require a lot radically changes

Yeah

sounds good, I'm cooking up some pasta... talk to you after lunch

kevinb7: I'm back whenever you are

yup, I'm here

Okay

Well I'll keep reviewing your stuff for now, I guess.

There might be some stuff I'm unsure of merging, so I'll leave those be for noiw

I talked to someone about finishing up adding all of the symbols

Some day we'll have to figure out fonts and stuff

were there any other things on the roadmap you wanted to discuss?

sorry if I seem unresponsive in this tread, but this web client doesn't autoscroll and doesn't beep... I should probably download a real IRC client

you could also try irccloud.com which appears to have a respectable free version

@xymostech: I'm signing off for today. If there's anything I can do to help out with macros, environments, or anything parser related don't hesitate to ask. Feel free to PM. I filled out the CLA form so you should have my email.