[spirit-of-light]

Functionality

This feature adds the (optional) functionality of rendering LaTeX.

Only content in display math environments ($$ and \[ \]), as well as package-defined environments, such as equation, align, gather, multline, tikzpicture, etc. is rendered. Content inside list items, code fences, quotes, or callouts is not rendered.
To accelerate compilation speed, a precompiled preamble is stored in the same directory as config.toml. If a user wishes to use a package which is not included by default they may add it to the preamble, along with any other settings.

Inline rendering is not implemented, as it affects individual line height and requires more complex implementation.

Settings added

• [terminal] math = "typst" | "latex" (default = "typst")
• [terminal] render_timeout = n seconds (default = 10)
• [terminal] render_concurrency = n (default = 2)

Behavior changes

• typst pictures now re-render when switching between dark and light themes.
• Timed-out mermaid and typst renders are retried when a note is opened.
• Syntax highlighting within LaTeX blocks.
• Enter closes [ and \begin{…}, under latex only.
• The MCP note-writing instructions ask for a bare tikzpicture under latex.

Dependencies

These dependencies are not included in the base zn installation. Users who wish to use LaTeX rendering must install these themselves.

• pdftex
• pdftocairo
• standalone, varwidth, preview, xcolor, amsmath, amsfonts, mhchem and pgf LaTeX packages

On macOS:

brew install poppler
brew install --cask basictex
eval "$(/usr/libexec/path_helper)"   # or open a new terminal, so /Library/TeX/texbin is on PATH
sudo tlmgr update --self
sudo tlmgr install standalone varwidth preview xcolor amsmath amsfonts mhchem pgf

[adibhanna]

Thank you for this, @spirit-of-light. It's a big, careful piece of work, and the real-TeX tests made reviewing it much easier. It landed unchanged in 844c19f (via #18) and shipped in zn v0.12.0.

The review turned up a few things. They're fixed in separate follow-up commits so your commits stay as you wrote them:

• Wide blocks were clipped (ab7dede). standalone's varwidth page is \linewidth wide, so a long \[ \] lost its tail and a 20 cm tikzpicture stopped at about 12 cm. When the TeX log reports Overfull \hbox (Npt too wide), that block now renders again with \standaloneconfig{varwidth=\dimexpr\linewidth+Npt\relax}. A block that fits still renders once, so multline and equation numbers stay where they were.
• MCP instructions (2e3d1f6). The vault is shared with the desktop app, the phones and the share viewer, and they all render ```tikz fences but show a bare tikzpicture as text. So zn mcp keeps serving the desktop's instructions byte for byte under either engine. The preview handles the fence instead: under latex, ```tikz renders through your pipeline, normalised like the desktop's wrapSource (\documentclass is dropped, and \usepackage/\usetikzlibrary lines go before \begin{document}). The default preamble now loads the desktop's TikZ libraries too. Bare tikzpicture blocks still render.
• Editor colours under typst (47a0609). $$ holds KaTeX LaTeX, and chroma's typst lexer paints every backslash in it as an error (red). $$ bodies are now lexed as tex under both engines, and ```tikz fences as tex as well.
• Cache growth (21940b4). Formats and PNGs that haven't been used for 30 days are deleted. A session touches the ones it uses, so a second zn with its own preamble keeps its format.
• Comments (354723e). The AC/Step references point to a spec that isn't in the repo, so they now state the constraint itself. The texEnv comment also said reads were confined, but openin_any=p doesn't stop TeX Live 2026 from reading absolute or ../ paths. Your README warning had that right.

Everything else is as you built it: the shared runner and pool, the format single-flight, the crop, timeout retry on open, the Enter closers, the doctor check and the docs.