Markdown support in MATLAB R2025a is excellent
Mike Croucher
on 19 Jun 2025 at 17:52
Latest activity Edit by Royi Avital
on 9 Jul 2025 at 17:39
In case you missed it in my overview of the MATLAB R2025a release, Markdown support has been greatly improved. This picture says it all
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Does it include support for LaTeX (MathJaX)?
I'm not sure specifically about MathJAX, but the viewer beautifully renders LaTeX
Indeed, looks decent.
Looking forward for 2025b (We decided to skip 2025a) to heavily use it.
My deam Literate Programming experience is to have this in MATLAB as an alternative to the Live Editor. Something like VS Code Interactive Window within MATLAB IDE.
I wasn't familiar with VS Code Interactive Window for Python, thanks for mentioning it. It looks pretty nice. The core workflow of the interactive window is well-supported in MATLAB - define a section with "%% " and you get a blue bar to run the section. Output goes to the command window.
We also now have text-based live scripts in 25a for users who like the Live Editor notebook environment, but want plain text files.
Which of the other features of the VS Code Interactive Window do you like?
Here are the ones that catch my eye, but I've never worked with it:
- A button in the output window to jump to the cell that created it.
This could be interesting more generally with the MATLAB Command Window - if the code was run from the Editor, the command window could try to link back to it (knowing it couldn't be perfect when code is edited). Of course, Live Editor with the output on the right already does this very well. You can click on any output to go to the section that creates it. The coupling is much tighter than in VS Code, since outputs get overwritten in place in stead of appended.
- Nicely formatted output in the output window
I've been wanting this for years, and now that we have a modern code base for the command window (built on JavaScript) it's much more feasible for us to work on this.
- Markdown rendering in the output window
I'm not really sure what the use case is for this with the VS Code Interactive Window, but I've got a growing number of use cases for markdown in the MATLAB Command Window.
Indeed. Probably the Cell approache should be credited to MATALB.
I mentioned it here in the meaning I'd be happy if MATLAB embraced the MarkDown syntax for cell which will be marked as MarkDown and then have "Interactive Run" when they are rendered similarly to Interactive Window.
Then this nice feature of rendering MarkDown will render the MarkDown cells.
In the long run, basically all the features of Live Script can be achieved in a similar way to JupyText (Which is what Interactive Window is based on) + Jupyter Engine.
In my opinion it is the best Literate Programming experience out there.
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