LaTeX used in widget controls is not rendered

[furnstahl]

The current (as of 25-Dec-2023) version of ipywidgets (8.1.1) does not render LaTeX code when used in widget labels. There is no problem with LaTeX rendering in markdown. See jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets#3849.

[furnstahl]

Followed the instructions here: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/blob/main/docs/source/dev_install.md to install the latest jupyterlab-widgets. It seems to work! Here are the commands used, within a test environment (from environment.yml with the name: changed to 8820-env-ipywidgets-test):

conda activate 8820-env-ipywidgets-test
conda install -c conda-forge yarn
git clone https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets.git
cd ipywidgets/
bash ./dev-install.sh

Tried this out on a couple of notebooks with widgets and their labels worked. No apparent side effects.

But we'll wait on trying to incorporate this into the standard environment.yml in the hope there is a new release soon.