I was not sure whether to put this into the talk section or the feature request but as of right now, the current state of Anytype doesn’t allow users to safely create and maintain their research efforts in Anytype. There are severe limitations preventing math/physics-based researchers to fully exploit and leverage Anytype as their main knowledge base of your choice. I will try to outline the current limitations bellow, in the hope that they would be prioritized by the team but first, I will try my best to explain why Anytype could be a safe heaven for us researchers and there’s a huge potential ready to be leveraged.
Local First
Nowadays, the internet is everywhere and most likely everyone has access to the Internet. However, the most important part of research is that you can safely rely on their tools to function without any delay and loss. Even one hour or one day of outage on some sever or Notion, Overleaf, etc. would mean that the research flow would get disrupted and there’s no way to work around that. So, having Anytype locally stored on our devices is a must. That’s why many people in the research community have already switched to Obsidian.
Privacy Focued
Again, one fear among researcher is that their work would be lost, or used without their permission or consnet which is basically solved with the efforts of Anytype, Anysync and the encryption currently implemented in Anytype.
Interconnection
This in my opinion is just the most important aspect of the structure of apps such as Anytype. I can’t stress enough how invaluable It is for us researcher to be able to connect our work with each other and easily trace back our notes and work, be able to manipulate and recall previous work quite quickly. In simple terms, it’s crucial to have the relevant information available upon request without digging through your files.
Personally, for my work, Anytype can be perfect because I can store my calculations and research in Anytype, and link to concepts that i’m using, or previous calculations. This is just a cheff’s kiss to have to not forcibly constantly go from one file to the next, or even worse, go through you long documents in Overleaf. This way you can clearly see the rabbit hole that you dug yourself into, and proceed forward and minimize the the time you spending recalling what you’ve done in the past, how you got there, or what was the definition for specific concept or what was its building blocks and requirements.
Having such a personalized knowledge-base is just invaluable.
Collaboration
Finally, being able to collaborate with other people on projects, commenting, having a chat and discussion is just the bedrock of how the academia work. So, being able to not only write down your research in Anytype, but also collaborate with your collegues and have conversations and get resolutions is just beautiful which is possible now in Anytype. And hopefully it would get better and improve in the near future with the introduction of comments, and Transculsion and block based commenting and having threads in Anytype.
Now onto some of the issues, and limitations that Anytype face to be the perfect destination and home for Research.
Latex shortcommings
Right now there are several limitations and features lacking in Anytype which myself and others have highlighted in the community which I’m going to name them here.
Partial rendering of the Inline Latex
As I’ve reported before, currently Anytype doesn’t support the partial rendering of the inline Latex, and when any block containing one is selected, all the inline latex math would be shown in the code, and wouldn’t render before the block is deselected. This would result in kind of a mess whenever we want to edit one of these inline maths since normally there are a lot of them in any given paragraph.
Limitation of Latex blocks
As of right now, the only way of having a standalone Latex block is via the specific block dedicated to it. However, it presents a number of problems. Namely, it severely lacks compatibility with other formats such as:
- $$…$$
- \[…\]
- \(…\)
So, when you want to switch back between markdown apps such as Obsidian or Latex editors such as Overleaf, if you just normally copy and paste the code from there to Anytype, it just creates a mess as Anytype doesn’t support rendering these types of blocks. So, this severely hinders your flexibility which is quite damning.
Lack of proper Markdown support for importing and exporting
As of right now, when you use the Anytype’s importing tools for getting your markdown files, or directly from Obsidian into Anytype, it is just not reliable at all. The main issue is that in the markdown files, mostly the block equations are in $$…$$ and they’re not converted into Latex block of Anytype, so they end up in their unrendered code or in their additional $…$ which again, would lead to editing them difficult to say the least. So, not only that, but you can not import or copy and paste your code from your Latex files either because you would end up with lots of unrendered Latex code which is not usable at all.
The situation with exporting from Anytype is not much better too. When you export your data from anytype into Markdown format, not only you loose your block hierarchy and structure, which to be honest is expected, but all the inline latex is exported in a broken manner, random characters show up in them which completely make them unusable. So, once again you get locked into Anytype and can’t move back and forth in Overleaf or other Latex editors which is crucial for publication.
API and MCP
As of right now, neither the API or MCP doesn’t support the creation of LATEX blocks. So, even if I were to outsource it into other tools such as Claude code, I still wouldn’t be able to completely bring my Latex files into Anytype which is an absolute shame.
To be honest, the best case scenario right now is to use app such as Obsidian in combination with Overleaf, but the lack of block based editor and the user-friendly implementation of databases, makes the experience much more worse compared to Anytype. So, I really hope the team would take this matter into their consideration for their future roadmap.