Is it possible to have an inline math preview feature that reveals realtime changes?

[DRuiCHEN]

The math preview on-hover feature is great and makes it more efficient to preview math equations. However, the preview disappear once I press any key or move the mouse cursor away. As a result, every time we modify the equations we have to move the mouse cursor again to trigger the preview.

I am wondering if we can somehow make the followings happen:

1. pin the hovering-preview, say, by some hotkeys, so that it won't disappear when we move the cursor away or modify the equations;
2. the preview auto updates to reveal realtime changes in the equations.

[seragunn]

There are various extensions for quick math preview inside a Markdown document. Maybe it would be possible to have our extension open up a new markdown tab to use such extensions.

Now that I'm thinking about it, one would like to be able to copy the equations between the latex document and the markdown document and I don't think there's a good way to do this, because LaTeX-workshop doesn't touch markdown files.

Another consideration is that you probably want such a preview function to be done using KaTeX rather than MathJax, which is the current renderer. KaTeX is faster and this is important if you're constantly trying to update it in a "live preview". Most of the markdown extensions use KaTeX. If we wanted to do that in this extension, we'd have to bundle a copy of KaTeX.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that anything beyond a simple "copy this equation into a new markdown document" is going to be too complicated to develop and maintain.

[DRuiCHEN]

Thank you for getting to the request so quickly.
I agree that a "live preview" feature could be too heavy to have for now. But is there a simple way to make it easier to trigger the hovering preview? The hovering preview feature that we currently have is great, but I am just so reluctant to move to the beginning of the math block every time I want to see the preview...

[tecosaur]

Personally, I'm looking forward to when this API (microsoft/vscode#66418) enters stable,
— see #1122.

I think that is the best method of approaching this. Simply put, hover preview was designed for taking a quick peek, this is more what we really want.

[DRuiCHEN]

Thanks a lot! I look forward the future enhancement.