LaTeX support

We've been teasing, promising, and exploring LaTeX support for three years, and it's finally here.

You might not even know what LaTeX is (and we wrote a handy little glossary entry just for you, if so), but if you've ever read a math or science paper you've probably seen it in action.

The trickiest part about bringing LaTeX to Buttondown was making sure it worked everywhere — in the editor, in the preview, in the email itself. We ended up solving this by spinning up a custom renderer that lets us toggle between PNG, SVG, and HTML rendering on the fly so that every LaTeX block can be rendered in the most appropriate way for the medium.

(By the way: just like with footnotes, we open-sourced the Tiptap extension we use for LaTex in the editor.)