Support for \begin{align}?

[MichaelHatherly]

More of a question than a feature request really. Is support for \begin{align} (and other block environments) a planned feature that may be implemented here at some point, or is it out of scope for what the package is intended for?

Somewhat related to #18.

[korsbo]

I'm out shopping for a low-dependency way to render Latexify.jl equations (LaTeXStrings) into images so this could be very useful!

[Kolaru]

This kind of feature was definitively not planned, but falls in the scope of the package. In a sense, aligning characters and expressions is already most of what the package does ^^

The way to go is probably to consider that the latex expression is always in an align environnement so that & and \\ work by default, and there is no need to parse \begin ... \end blocks.

[korsbo]

The way to go is probably to consider that the latex expression is always in an align environnement so that & and \\ work by default, and there is no need to parse \begin ... \end blocks.

that sounds a little bit dangerous. One could imagine wanting to support \begin{cases} or something else where the interpretation is a bit different. One could also have mixed stuff, like

$A = \left( \begin{array}{c}
  1 \\
  2
\end{array} \right)$

where I imagine that you could run into problems.

[Kolaru]

I don't quite see the problem, the example you give should work just fine if fed into an align env. In any case, we need to choose which kind of environnement is used for the overall equation (currently it always mimics a equation env, even for inline math e.g. We have $x = y^2$.).

Supporting \begin ... \end block more generally is, I think, a different and more complicated problem, at least from the point of view of parsing, since some character can have special meaning inside environnements.