Image preview for flowing inline LaTeX math

Does this feature exist in Emacs orgmode core?

Yes

Orgmode link

https://orgmode.org/manual/Previewing-LaTeX-fragments.html

Feature value

There is already partial support for rendering a LaTeX preview as an image of block environments, e.g.

\[
a + b
\]

and even the inline (the newlines here are important)

\(
a + b
\)

will conceal the text in the buffer and replace it with an image of the rendered LaTeX, using snacks.nvim.

However, it's really unnatural to write inline LaTeX in such a way; really, you want to be able to write it like:

Consider \( a = b + c \), blah blah blah; then we can conclude \( d \) ...

without newlines between the inline math delimiters \( and \).

Currently, orgmode is able to recognise this markup and highlight the inline math fragments (#428), but not present the contents to snacks.nvim in order to render a LaTeX preview.

Additional context

The existing image preview functionality was introduced in a series of PRs:

• #945
• #935
• #907

Unfortunately, I think it's not possible to merely tweak the tree-sitter queries in https://github.com/nvim-orgmode/orgmode/blob/master/queries/org/images.scm to achieve the desired functionality.
This is because the current tree-sitter parser will parse \( a + b \) into (paragraph (expr) (expr) (expr) (expr) (expr)), where each (expr) corresponds to each space-delimited word.
In contrast,

\(
a + b
\)

parses into (latex_env contents: (contents (…))), where the contents node represents the parse of a + b.
In other words, we would need some kind of latex_inline node (the target of a tree-sitter query) which contains only the expr nodes within \( and \), which requires changes to the tree-sitter parser.

Start with queries/org/images.scm and the image-preview changes in issues #945, #935, and #907. Inspect how inline expressions are parsed compared with latex_env nodes, then trace how matching nodes reach snacks.nvim. Done means flowing inline math such as ( a = b + c ) is rendered as an image without requiring newlines.