off the cuff, this feels like a "don’t cross the streams’ thing
(there is that webfont or whatever thing for html latex, but having looked under the hood on lemmy’s post handling I uhhhhhhh yeah)
neat idea though, maybe that should be a thing that philthy can do better
oh but see, it has at least 2-if-you-squint representations of things (and possibly more? it’s been a while since I read the code). it’s got “raw”, which represents semi sorta whatever the user input
iirc it broadly takes that for a local render (as in on the site frontend)
and then it also makes a $something for the thing it sends out over ActivityPub
I do want to make it clear that I’m not carrying water for lemmy here, fwiw. this’d be a legit cool thing to add to things (whether the spape it took was “renders latex locally, and ships images remote” or whatever). just saying it might be hairy