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Comment by rhezab | Hacker News Reader

If you add math support, I'd give it a try

You mean math symbols? Thought about doing that

Yes, please do! My job involves a lot of math, so it a dealbreaker for me when notetaking software doesn't have math support. These days it's very easy to include! The easiest way is to use KaTeX [1] to render math between dollar sign tags for inline math like this $x+y=5$ and for display math like this:

  $$
  \int_a^b f(x) dx
  $$

Many markdown parsers (like markdown-it) have plugins for math support. In the future, I would also heavily recommend looking into using ProseMirror [2] for wysiwyg Markdown editing.

(I'm currently working on adding wysiwyg math editing to ProseMirror -- see the gifs here [3] for an early proof of concept).

[1] https://katex.org/ [2] https://prosemirror.net/ [3] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math

Maybe a bit late, but chiming in here to say that prosemirror in general is absolutely amazing. Used it to build my own note taking app, highly recommended.

Thanks for making Notebag, I just tried it out and love how straightforward it is! I hope you'll consider adding math support in the future! Feel free to use my math plugin [1] as a starting point, it's MIT licensed. (still under development, but it's solid enough to use already)

[1] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math

oh wow prosemirror is awesome, will definitely look into adding it

Sold. I’ll take a look.

Awesome! FWIW I currently use a clone [1] of Andy's notes website [2], to which I've added KaTeX support. The biggest feature is the Roam-style bidirectional linking. But your system is sufficiently simpler that I think I'll give it a try, at least for some use cases.

Roam-style bidirectional linking would be cool, but I wonder if it's better to keep it simple for everyone else rather than add very specific features for the few people like me. Your call...

Anyways, cool project! You're definitely making something people want :)

[1] https://github.com/aravindballa/gatsby-theme-andy/

[2] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

Funny enough Andy’s website is one of the reasons I started this. I have bidirectional linking on the roadmap since day one, but not like Roam, I plan to do something different to keep it simple. For me simplicity is number one here :)

Yes, I passionately agree with simplicity as a core principle. This makes me very excited to see how you implement bidirectional linking.

Godspeed!

I've had a bunch of problems with KaTeX, I'd recommend mathjax instead.

What are the problems you've had? I'm about to switch to KaTeX for speed which will take quite a bit of work and this got me spooked.

It replaces my LaTex with unicode symbols that often look shitty, and are usually the wrong size. Also, it sometimes never rendered my equations. Don't let this totally dissuade you, I never really looked into it (switching to mathjax was easier) but I just remember that "out-of-the-box", a lot of things were broken.

fwiw, I haven't had this experience at all. KaTeX has been extremely easy to integrate into my projects with a simple katex.render(my_math_str). Perhaps you had some string encoding issues separate from katex?

I’d like math symbols too. There are a few libraries that make it “easy” (though I understand it’s rare for a feature to be “easy”).

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