Support for explicit direction commands inside MathJax to allow nice embedding of RTL words/phases using \text{}.

[taniwallach]

Embedding \text{} with Hebrew words (or words in other RTL languages) into math expressions is not convenient.

At present in both v3 and v4 it is necessary to flip the order of the Hebrew letters to get them to render properly. That obviously breaks how such text is handed by the accessibility features, and is inconvenient for the author.

@orelby wrote an Obsidian plugin Obsidian rtl-math-text plugin https://github.com/orelby/obsidian-rtl-math-text-plugin which addresses for Obsidian. Essentially, it adds CSS classes to set the needed direction, and special LaTeX commands \L and \R to control swaps in text direction (and allows configuration of the macro names).

It would be really nice if something like that could be in the "core" of MathJax in the future.

[dpvc]

My usual advice to those using text in R-to-L languages is to set output.mtextInheritFont to true in the MathJax configuration. E.g.,

MathJax = {
  output: {
    mtextInheritFont: true,
  }
};

so that the contents of \text{} will be a normal text element (rather than MathJax's individual character elements), so it will be handled by the browser's usual text engine. That way

x + \text{כאשר} + y

will produce

It would be good for MathJax to have fuller R-to-L support, but this at least gets you partway there.