NEWS.md

In latexr: Translate 'LaTeX' Formulas to R Code

latexr 0.3.0

Renaming

• The package was renamed from latex2r to latexr. The public API is unchanged: the main functions are still latex2r() and latex2fun(), and errors are still raised as conditions of class latex2r.error.

New features

• Statistical notation: \bar{x} and \overline{x} translate to mean(x), and \tilde{x} translates to median(x).
• Rolling sums: \sum_{k}^{}{x} translates to data.table::frollsum(x, k). The exponent group after ^ is parsed for notation compatibility but ignored.
• Missing values: latex2r() and latex2fun() gained an na.rm argument. When TRUE, calls to mean() and median() are emitted with na.rm = TRUE (frollsum() is not affected since it handles missing values differently). The default FALSE keeps the output unchanged.
• Unicode input: latex2r() now normalizes the characters commonly emitted by visual formula editors (MathQuill) and plain keyboard input before scanning. Minus signs, ×, ⋅, ÷, Greek letters, and accented vowels such as ā, ã and â become the equivalent LaTeX commands. The new normalize_mathquill() function is exported so the mapping can be inspected and reused.
• New latex2ast() function that returns the parsed abstract syntax tree of a formula instead of its R translation, for debugging and tooling.
• \ln{x} translates to log(x) (alias of \log).
• Absolute value: \left|x\right| translates to abs(x).
• Spacing commands (\;, \,, \:, \quad, \qquad) are now ignored instead of raising "Unrecognized latex character".

Maintenance and fixes

• Fixed a crash when implicit multiplication followed a braced rolling-sum operand (e.g. \sum_{3}^{2}{x}y).
• Fixed stop_custom() conditions not inheriting from class "error", which made errors raised by latex2r() impossible to catch with tryCatch(error = ...) and aborted non-interactive sessions. tryCatch(..., class = "latex2r.error") and expect_error(class = "latex2r.error") now work as documented.
• The parser no longer drops residual tokens after a complete expression (e.g. the trailing } in \sqrt{x}}); it now raises a latex2r.error.
• latex2fun() no longer mistakes named call arguments for assignments, so formulas translating to log(x, base = 2) (or using na.rm = TRUE) work.

Authors

• Rodrigo Borges [e-mail] is now the creator and maintainer. Tomas Capretto remains author and contributor.

latex2r 0.2.0

Maintenance and fixes

• Fixed a bug related to implicit multiplication failing when using CARET (#2)
• Added tests for implicit multiplication

Internal

• The Token R6 class now has a print.Token S3 method. Useful for debugging.

latex2r 0.1.3

New features

• Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.
• Implicit multiplication. Now the parser interprets things such as "xy" as "x * y". Explicit multiplication still works.

Maintenance and fixes

• Only variable names can have subscripts.
• latex2fun() utils were updated so now, for example, any letter can be a function argument. In general the process of transforming a latex expression to a function is more robust.
• pi is not detected as function argument anymore.
• latex2fun() raises an error if there is an assignment within the expression.
• Example translations in README

Deprecation

• Deleted latexInput() and launch_app(). Thus, the package does not need either shiny or mathquill anymore.

latexr documentation built on Sept. 30, 2026, 5:08 p.m.