Thoughts on WYSIWYG formula editing

General
1

Hi all,

While working on the math editor for TyX I came across a library called mathlive which provides a web component with a WYSIWYG editor for math formulas, based on LaTeX.

Of course, I want to tweak mathlive so it supports Typst, and better yet if possible create some fork which is Typst-based!

For now, I created a PR which adds a new getValue(“typst”) option.

However, I would love to hear the thoughts you have about how to go about forking this for Typst - my biggest question would be how to insert commands/symbols? since on the one hand Typst has no “backslash” concept, but on the other - always showing a popup seems like a bad user experience.

1 Like
2

Hi.

With the keyboard?

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I even tried writing alpha and it auto converted it, same with <=. So this is mostly solved.

Oh, so it autocompletes the command in this field and not in the HTML…

You can show popup only with Ctrl+Space.

I’m not a WYSIWYG kinda guy, apart from browser, so I don’t have any thoughts, but autocompletion and conversion is nice. Like any math keyboard, you would have to get used to the layout. I struggled for 5–10 seconds to find fraction button only to find out that it’s hidden under division button, no boxes like on other template buttons.

3

Thank you!
Here would be my concerns:

  • The virtual keyboard is probably necessary for mobile, if we’re even considering that; On the other hand, it is much slower using the mouse, so I’m looking for a keyboard-based solution.
  • Ctrl+Space seems good, although maybe slow. Perhaps allowing customization helps this out. In any case, it seems better than backslash, thanks!
  • The inline completions are problematic in my opinion since it has prefix collisions. For instance, you have the “in” symbol and also “infinity” and “integral”.
4

All keyboard-based completions are either implicit with substitutions/snippets, or with a dropdown menu. I imagine that WYSIWYG is always catered towards mouse users (majority of people are like this), since folks like me are zooming in terminal in file manager, IDE/text editor (Neovim, btw), etc. I guess you can make a toggle of what is the preferred input method.

  1. convert after space or something
  2. for infinity, use oo
5

I get what you’re saying, but I think that having a dropdown/autocomplete might be more robust and faster.

Perhaps enabling both options could also be a fine way to go.

6

Maybe use \ to mean this is a symbol. And press enter to show it. The \ won’t be written in the real source code.