Bento Slides 1.2.4: maths that renders, fonts that load, and steadier live sessions

[nyblnet]

Maths

1.2.0 swapped in a smaller maths engine of our own, and a lot of everyday LaTeX quietly stopped rendering: \frac12, \pmod, \xrightarrow, \land and many more. When a formula hit one of those, the whole thing showed as raw text. Thanks to ForgeCogAI for reporting it in #540.

1.2.4 fixes that and goes further. Every command the old engine knew renders again, plus macros (\newcommand, \DeclareMathOperator), the physics package and chemistry with \ce{…}. Formulas written as \(…\) or \[…\] now work too. That is the form ChatGPT, Claude and most Markdown produce, so pasted answers render instead of showing backslashes. A display formula can run over several lines of a text box. If a command still isn't recognised, the rest of the formula renders and the unknown command shows in red, so your audience sees the maths rather than a line of LaTeX.

One visible change to existing decks: aligned and cases now line up the way TeX sets them, with the equals signs in a column. Until now every column was centred.

Fonts

Rahul Ravikumar found that a deck loaded through Replace from JSON could keep showing fallback fonts instead of the ones embedded in it, and fixed it (#516). On top of that, removing a font now removes it, and undo and redo bring fonts back and forth.

Live sessions

• Collaborators no longer flicker in and out. A tab in the background used to look like it left and rejoined about once a minute, because browsers slow a hidden tab's timers. Now it shows as away.
• A deck with lots of small images, like a wall of icons, can be shared live. The pictures travel separately once together they would make the deck too big to send in one piece.

Saving

A deck opened from the web or through the Bento apps now remembers where it is saved. After a reopen, the first save asks once and then saves in place. A deck opened straight from disk still asks each time, on purpose, because local files are kept apart from each other.

Open the About dialog in any deck and the update will be offered. It is signed like every release, and your file is rewritten in place with the same content.