Support for the use and rendering of LaTeX in docstrings

[QuackDilly]

I am currently writing some relatively deep mathematical code, and I would like it if I could have some LaTeX notation rendered and embedded in the Python tooltips; I have tried writing an extension to render LaTeX in Python VSC, but I have determined it to be near impossible to embed it in the tooltips properly, and regardless, it would be much appreciated by me and I would think many others if LaTeX support was already built in. Not only would this serve to make me happy, because, of course, my happiness is certainly of the highest priority, but it would greatly offer science/math-heavy codebases the option to use more mathematically readable notation.

I have zero idea how it could be accomplished natively, the way I tried to render LaTeX with my extension was by using CodeCogs, but, seeing as VSC tooltips already supports Markdown, however, one way you might go about it is through MathJax or KaTeX.

I have no idea though, I'm not much of a super technical programmer as of right now and I'm merely only writing a suggestion, and while I wish I could offer some practical point to jump off from to help create my request, I am simply peanut-brained.

[debonte]

@rchiodo, thoughts on this? I saw #2058 saying that back in 2021 we didn't have a way to support this. Has anything changed?

[QuackDilly]

my mistake, i didnt mean to start a new issue for the same problem lol

[rchiodo]

We could do latex parsing as part of our restructured text parsing and then use one of the latex converters for markdown, but it'd be a lot of work. We'd need a lot of up votes to make it worthwhile.

[debonte]

Moving this issue to discussions as an enhancement request for comments and upvotes.

[lampnis]

I don't know if this has been worked on, but I have seen already way back people talking about this. So what exactly is the problem? Is the concern that heavier markdown renderer will make help hovers slow and unusable? If we don't want to just let AI ruin the world and help actual people working on hard problems, I think this would be very helpful. But I also know that it must be annoying for open source devs to hear people whining about some small non-problems. But nevertheless, I think this would be a huge quality of life improvement. Anyways, if somebody has any solution to this that I do not know about (because I am so bad at using internet and search engines), or can help with understanding the core of the issue, I will stop yapping 🤣

[rchiodo]

It's a matter of resources. We have only so many people and so much work to do. We generally use up votes to prioritize that work. This item currently has 2 votes (as of this post) so it's not likely to end up being worked on.