I built an extension to copy equations in ChatGPT
On March 30th, someone posted to the ChatGPT community about a browser extension they'd built themselves. The problem it solves is unglamorous but genuinely irritating: ChatGPT renders mathematical equations beautifully in the browser, all clean notation and proper formatting, but the moment you try to copy one, you get raw LaTeX syntax or a garbled string that's useless outside the chat window. No fanfare preceded this post. No changelog, no ProductHunt launch, no founder story. A developer hit the same wall enough times, decided the workaround was worse than the problem, and built something. Then told the internet. That's the whole story so far.
If confirmed, here is what this means. The problem this extension addresses isn't obscure — it affects students, researchers, engineers, and anyone who uses ChatGPT as a thinking partner for technical work. Copying a rendered equation into a paper, a slide deck, or a document editor is a workflow step so basic that its friction feels almost insulting. A working solution, even a personal one distributed as an extension, normalises the expectation that AI interfaces should handle the full copy-paste cycle cleanly, not just the display half of it. The second-order point is more interesting: OpenAI has had ample time to solve this natively and hasn't, which means the gap is real enough that individual developers are routing around it. That's a quiet indictment dressed up as a compliment.
Watch for the extension appearing on the Chrome Web Store or GitHub with any meaningful download or star count — that would confirm both the tool's existence and that the pain point is as widespread as it feels.
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><pre><code>The whole thing is Python/Flask/SQLite. 53 test files, 595 test methods. Apache-2.0 licensed. Screenshots and quick start:
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I almost pasted my API key into ChatGPT today.</p> <p>It was literally one Enter away.</p> <p>That made me realize something weird…</p> <p>We use
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Before the UI revamp (sometime in August 2026), copying equations from ChatGPT website would also include MathML. This worked great with Office
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1s7p7ky/sora_is_shutting_down_openais_backup_is_a_full/"> <img alt="Sora is shutting down. OpenAI's 'backup' is
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I got annoyed that every time I tried to copy/paste in to outlook the text was completely different so I built <a
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1sm5m94/i_got_tired_of_scrolling_in_long_threads_so_i/"> <img alt="I got tired of scrolling in long threads, so
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1x9d9yv/chatgpt_plugin_directory_free_open_source/"> <img alt="ChatGPT Plugin Directory - Free & Open
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>ChatGPT removed the ability to select and copy entire conversations. If you have a long chat, you're stuck copying message by message.</p> <p>I
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