Math Formulas Now Render Cleanly

Ask Claude to explain the Schrödinger equation, and until this week you got back a wall of raw LaTeX.

Now the formula renders, the way a textbook would show it.

KaTeX is wired into every chat surface in Daneel, page Q&A, vault chat, and the settings docs viewer. Inline math with single dollars and display math with double dollars both work, and the usual suspects, matrices, integrals, summations with bounds, fractions, Greek letters, are all covered.

Before, you'd get something like this:

$$\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} \, dx = \sqrt{\pi}$$

$$i\hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi(\mathbf{r}, t) = \hat{H} \, \Psi(\mathbf{r}, t)$$

$$\det(A) = \sum_{\sigma \in S_n} \mathrm{sgn}(\sigma) \prod_{i=1}^{n} a_{i,\sigma(i)}$$

Now rendered as:

∫−∞∞e−x2 dx=π\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} \, dx = \sqrt{\pi}

iℏ∂∂tΨ(r,t)=H^ Ψ(r,t)i\hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi(\mathbf{r}, t) = \hat{H} \, \Psi(\mathbf{r}, t)

det⁡(A)=∑σ∈Snsgn(σ)∏i=1nai,σ(i)\det(A) = \sum_{\sigma \in S_n} \mathrm{sgn}(\sigma) \prod_{i=1}^{n} a_{i,\sigma(i)}

And the most beautiful of them all, Einstein's field equations in their full glory:

Gμν+Λgμν=8πGc4TμνG_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} = \frac{8\pi G}{c^4} T_{\mu\nu}

Classical formulas look right.

If the model emits malformed TeX, the rest of the message still renders, and the broken fragment falls back to its raw source rather than swallowing the answer.

A few details behind the polish, since they say something about the bar we try to hold:

  • Local fonts, no CDN. All twenty KaTeX woff2 files ship inside the extension. Render a formula on a flight, it still works.
  • Shadow DOM ready. The widget lives inside a shadow root. The KaTeX stylesheet is injected as a link tag, not inlined, so relative font URLs resolve against the extension origin. Skip that detail and you get broken fonts in silent ways.
  • No configuration. Ask for math, receive math. No toggle, no system prompt hint.

Nothing bigger to claim than that.

If you use Daneel for physics, chemistry or mathematics, the chat now renders the answers you were expecting.