Closed as not planned
Description
Is this your first time submitting a feature request?
- I have read the expectations for open source contributors
- I have searched the existing issues, and I could not find an existing issue for this feature
- I am requesting a straightforward extension of existing dbt functionality, rather than a Big Idea better suited to a discussion
Describe the feature
When writing doc blocks, sometimes it's useful to include formulas of the calculation so other users know precisely how a particular metric is defined. Currently, DBT supports Markdown rendering in its docs. LaTeX is the typical way to write formulae, and is supported by a large range of Markdown "flavours". It should be fairly simple to add a LaTeX preprocessor to the DocumentationParser.parse_block() method, which could be bundled as an optional dependency to ensure no performance hit for existing users.
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Writing code blocks into the doc string helps sometimes, but choice of language and implementation details sometimes make the intent unclear.
- "Verbal" descriptions work for simple formulae, but sometimes things like algebraic substitutions get messy if using words to describe formula substitutions
- External documentation breaks one of the nice things about DBT, that it all lives in one codebase!
Who will this benefit?
- Maintainers of the DBT model who are governing more complex metrics
- Anyone who needs a little more flexibility in writing their docs
- Teams that work closely with data scientists or other Jupyter-like markdown standards
It also keeps DBT in line with how Markdown works on a lot of platforms (e.g. Github)
Are you interested in contributing this feature?
I'd be happy to implement, given some road rules esp. about bundling additional packages
Anything else?
Not a huge priority, obviously, but would be a nice QoL boost for better docs.