LaTeX notes

.tex and .latex files are notes, not imports — edited, published, searched and linked exactly as markdown is.

LaTeX is the typesetting language scientists and mathematicians write papers in; a .tex file is its source. In Astrolabe a .tex file is a note, not something imported and converted. It is in the tree, in search, in the graph, in the backlinks panel, in the tag counts, in the post list and in the RSS feed, and it publishes to the blog exactly as a .md note does: the same typography, the same themes, the same visitor scoping, in both languages. And pdflatex still typesets it as it always did, because everything Astrolabe adds is either a LaTeX comment or a macro (a command you define yourself) that you keep beside the file.

• Live-preview editor. CodeMirror's stex mode, themed to whichever of the forty-six themes you are in, with the same bargain the markdown editor makes: the line the caret is on shows raw TeX, and every other line reads as the thing it becomes. Section headings are set in serif; \emph, \textbf and \texttt render; \item becomes a bullet or its number; $…$ and display environments are typeset by KaTeX; \cite is a chip; and \begin{figure} shows the actual image from your vault with its caption. (Section and equation numbers belong to the reading view. They are a property of the whole document, and a number that renumbered itself as you typed above it would be a distraction rather than a preview; the outline panel beside the editor prints them.) Fold any environment or section from the chevron beside it. Autocomplete covers \note{, \ref{, \cite{ and \begin{ (which writes the matching \end for you).
• The formatting keys write LaTeX here. Ctrl/Cmd B in a .tex note writes \textbf{…}, not **…**; Ctrl/Cmd I writes \emph{…}; inline code is \texttt{…}; "Heading 2" is \subsection{…}; a bulleted list is an itemize environment; and a wikilink is \note{…}. Strikethrough, highlight, the task list and the colour swatches are absent from the menu in a .tex note rather than approximated: LaTeX cannot spell them without a package your document may not load, and a key that quietly writes something neither Astrolabe nor pdflatex can render is worse than a key that does nothing.
• Reading and publishing. Rendered in the same visual language as markdown: numbered sections, numbered equations, "Figure 1" captions, theorem boxes, resolved cross-references, a \bibitem bibliography, footnotes. The outline panel follows the \section hierarchy.
• Frontmatter that pdflatex ignores. A comment block at the top of the file:

  %---
  % publish: true
  % tags: [physics, fourier]
  % banner: "Media/heat.png"
  %---%
  

  or, if you would rather write a macro, \astrolabe{publish=true, citekey=fourier1822}.
• Links, three ways. \note{Fourier Transform} and \note[the transform]{Fourier Transform} are Astrolabe's own macro (keep astrolabe.sty beside the file and it typesets anywhere). %% [[Private Scratch]] %% is a link the PDF never shows. And an existing project's links work unmodified, because \input, \include, \cite, \ref and \eqref already say what they mean: Astrolabe only looks for what they name in the vault as well, after looking beside the file first, so bringing a project into the vault never changes what it produces.
• Headings and labels are one thing. A markdown heading and a LaTeX \label are the same kind of thing, so [[Heat Equation#eq:fourier]] and \note{Notes\#Derivation} are one lookup in either direction, and ![[Heat Equation#eq:fourier]] transcludes just that equation, rendered by KaTeX, into a markdown note.

A .tex note takes the site's text direction, so an Arabic paper is written right to left, but it refuses the alignment setting: its source is markup from end to end.

astrolabe.sty

The dozen lines that make \note{…} understood outside Astrolabe. Download it from your own instance at /api/astrolabe.sty (or "LaTeX: download astrolabe.sty" in the command palette), drop it beside your document, and add \usepackage{astrolabe}. Without it the file still opens in Astrolabe; with it, pdflatex typesets the very same file.

What renders, and what does not

An honest boundary beats a leaky claim of "full LaTeX". Anything not listed below is passed through as a quiet inline marker, never as raw source and never as a crash, and a document that cannot be parsed still opens, is listed, publishes and is searchable by its title.

Known simplifications, stated up front rather than left for you to discover: numbering is article-style (1, 1.1, 1.1.1) whatever the document class; \ref prints a number for a label in the same note, and the target's title when the label is in another note, because a bare "1" means nothing in someone else's paper; and BibTeX is not run, so \cite looks for a \bibitem in the document or a note carrying that citekey:, and is otherwise left as it is.