\[ and \( as delimiters

[ianqsong]

This plug-in seems only support dollar signs as delimiters, but \[ and \( are also widely used (e.g. math formula in response from chatgpt). I was wondering if these would be supported here.

[hopkins385]

True. Can we add configurable delimiters?

[TuringJest]

+1

[ShaunDychko]

As a workaround it's possible to preprocess the markdown text to replace \( style delimiters with $-style delimiters.
The KaTeX project provides the file contrib/auto-render/splitAtDelimiters.js which can be used in a custom script normalizeDelimiters.js:

import splitAtDelimiters from "./splitAtDelimiters";
const normalizeDelimiters = (markdownText) => {
  const data = splitAtDelimiters(markdownText, [
    {left: "\\[", right: "\\]", display: true},
    {left: "\\(", right: "\\)", display: false},
  ]);
  let result = "";
  data.forEach((segment) => {
    if (segment.type === "text") {
      result += segment.data;
    }
    else if (segment.type === "math") {
      result += segment.display ? `$$${segment.data}$$` : `$${segment.data}$`;
    }
  })
  return result;
}

export default normalizeDelimiters;

@vscode/markdown-it-katex should probably consider replacing the custom parsing done in src/index.ts by leveraging contrib/auto-render/splitAtDelimiters.js from the KaTeX project.