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I'm not sure whether it has already been asked - couldn't find it. But what about Latex render support for Markdown? Imagine a question asked like the following

Hello all, why is this text not printed bold-italic?

$$\bf\it Hello world$$

I wonder whether one could make this show the latex formatted code by default, and clicking on it would render it inline. Or do you have some other idea?

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    It has been asked in some form, (currently) just a few questions down: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7/we-need-tex-markup and meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158/latex-sand-box – Caramdir Aug 8 '10 at 14:10
  • We had it turned off: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/181/… (though yes, having LaTeX rendering would be great, just as long as it doesn't interfere with typing code). In any case, \bf and \it don't work in math mode — what you've written ($$\bf\it Hello world$$) will look as if it's the product of the variables H, e, l, l, o, w, etc. – ShreevatsaR Aug 8 '10 at 15:59
  • @ShreevatsaR it would interpret the latex outside of math mode. (that's why double dollars are required as delimiters. math mode could be entered with single dollars inside). If one wants to quote latex code, one can use backticks or indentation, like one does on stackoverflow for any other code too. I think this would be a great thing for answers, so people can quickly skim over them to check whether they have what is looked for or not. – Johannes Schaub - litb Aug 8 '10 at 19:16
  • No, code is much more common than math here. Having to do something special to prevent the code you type from getting screwed up is awful; we had the automatic math rendering for a few days and everyone quickly got frustrated. The double dollars are (displayed) math mode, so I don't know what you mean. Anyway I agree that some special syntax for having rendering would be useful, it just must not be something likely to be present in LaTeX code, such as dollars or double dollars. – ShreevatsaR Aug 10 '10 at 3:08
  • @ShreevatsaR oh i wasn't aware double dollars are used in latex for something. I'Ve never done math with latex :) – Johannes Schaub - litb Aug 10 '10 at 10:43
  • I saw that the service was turned off before. But what about implementing a solution that leaves the code as it is by default. And that, by specifying it, you can turn the latex code into a preview. Like some answers suggest. For example, wordpress let you do some $latex ... $ to add code. The same can be implemented, in such a way that the code is left alone, and if you want to render it you should specify it. Is there any plan on turning this feature on again? – adn Feb 1 '12 at 11:29

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