Configurable LaTeX delimeter

[Neil_Olver]

As a heavy LaTeX user, the support for this in Dynalist is a great feature. I understand the rationale for not using ‘$’ as the delimeter, since this would be too annoying/unexpected for people not using Latex. But the non-standard markup is kind of a pain (it’s less familiar to read and type, and means the text can’t be immediately copied and used in a Latex document).

I would love some kind of configurable option to change the delimeter to ‘$’. (Ideally with the ability to use $ to escape the dollar sign when desired, though I could live without that).

Another possibility (not ideal, but better than the current choice IMO) would be to use ( and ), which is standard albeit rarely used.

[Erica]

Another possibility (not ideal, but better than the current choice IMO) would be to use ( and ), which is standard albeit rarely used.

( and ) to indicate LaTeX? Does that mean you’re not able to use parenthesis at all?

[Neil_Olver]

Oh, it was meant to be \( and \) (the backslash got escaped). (Hopefully this shows up correctly!)

[Erica]

Yes that showed up correctly.

Thanks for the suggestion, we’ll think about it. To type it faster one option is to use the shortcut. It’s customizable (shortcut customization is in Dynalist Pro though).

[Viktor_Papara]

I agree with you @Neil_Olver. Fortunately, there is a trello card for that:

For me, the readability is not a major problem. But not having the ability to copy text and latex and paste them into a latex document is mildly annoying. You could always do a search and replace ($$ -> $) in the text document after pasting, but you would need to make sure you don’t screw up other syntax with that.

With a customizable delimiter, Dynalist would be an ideal tool to draft scientific papers.

[Erica]

Woah cool! Didn’t know there’s a Trello embed on Discourse.

For me, the readability is not a major problem. But not having the ability to copy text and latex and paste them into a latex document is mildly annoying. You could always do a search and replace ($$ -> $) in the text document after pasting, but you would need to make sure you don’t screw up other syntax with that.

Yeah, we totally get the use case.

The biggest issue is that it’s not that straight-forward. For example, if you customized $$ to $, and you share a document with a friend who didn’t customize it.

In that case, we want to make sure you too are seeing the same equations, but that means we can’t just sync plain text between you too. We need to do extra processing to standardize the two… which might not sound like a lot but it’s actually a lot of work given how data sync is structured right now.

We’ll need to figure out what to do about that before implementing that