AI Math Paste

Paste math from AI assistants and the web into Obsidian without duplicated formulas or broken LaTeX delimiters.

AI Math Paste is a small, local-only Obsidian desktop plugin. When the clipboard contains MathML annotations or ChatGPT's data-math-source attributes, it recovers canonical LaTeX and removes duplicate visual layers. When a site's copy button strips that metadata and even removes the backslashes from \\[...\\] or \\(...\\), it conservatively restores high-confidence math delimiters from the plain-text structure.

Why it exists

Copying rendered math from an AI chat can put three representations of the same formula on the clipboard:

τ\tauτ
BBB
z0,iz_{0,i}z0,i

When the clipboard includes reliable application/x-tex annotations, AI Math Paste recovers:

$\tau$
$B$
$z_{0,i}$

It also converts \(...\) to $...$ and \[...\] to $$...$$ while preserving code blocks, inline code, lists, blockquotes, tables, and existing dollar-delimited math.

Current ChatGPT copy-button output can instead look like:

[
(c_t,\ a_t,\ c_{t+1})
]

Computed by (m_\eta).

AI Math Paste restores the standalone block and high-confidence inline formula before converting them to Obsidian math. Ambiguous text such as (q) remains unchanged.

Use

1. Copy text containing math from an AI chat or web page.
2. Place the cursor in a Markdown editing view.
3. Run Paste and clean AI math from the command palette or click the sigma ribbon icon.

If text is selected, the same command repairs the selection instead of inserting new text.

Obsidian community plugins should not define default hotkeys. A convenient personal binding is:

• Windows: Ctrl+Alt+V
• macOS: Cmd+Option+V

Evidence-first behavior

• With a TeX annotation in rich clipboard HTML, the plugin replaces the entire rendered formula node with its canonical LaTeX.
• With a role="math" element carrying data-math-source, the plugin uses that canonical LaTeX and its KaTeX layout mode. If aria-label is also present, both values must agree.
• Without that evidence, it converts explicit delimiters and restores stripped bracket or parenthesis delimiters only when the content has strong LaTeX or mathematical signals.
• It does not guess that ordinary text such as BBB is math.

Compatibility

• Desktop only in the first release.
• Tested on Windows with MathML annotations, ChatGPT data-math-source, and metadata-free ChatGPT/Codex clipboard output.
• Other sites work when their clipboard HTML includes MathML or KaTeX TeX annotations. Reports and fixtures for Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and academic websites are welcome.

Privacy

AI Math Paste runs entirely inside Obsidian. It has no AI API, network requests, accounts, analytics, or telemetry. Clipboard content is processed in memory and is not stored by the plugin.

Install

The initial community-directory submission is in preparation. During beta testing, install the latest GitHub release with BRAT using this repository URL:

https://github.com/8august8/obsidian-ai-math-paste

Development

npm install
npm run check

npm run check runs linting, unit tests, type checking, and the production build. The generated main.js is attached to GitHub releases and is intentionally not committed.

License

MIT

中文说明见 README.zh-CN.md。