7 ms·

This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about

This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about it. All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...

jcagalawan 8y ago
It's the same one as implemented in MS Word (and PowerPoint, OneNote), this standard was written by an engineer who is on the Math in Office team and maintains a blog [1]. It's the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've used so far. LaTeX has its place, but it's hard to convince non-coders to use it and I'm glad it has the editor. I stumbled into this specification trying to format a constrained optimization problem and found the equation array format to be fairly straightforward similar to the bmatrix environment in LaTeX and thought it was neat that Unicode could represent so much math. [1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/
- ygra 8y ago
  It should also be noted that Murray Sargent didn't just do whatever he thought of. He has done at least one math layout engine before, consulted with Donald Knuth regarding TeX and some choices that were made back then and a lot of the differences between this and TeX have a fairly sensible reason. For me, I'm able to use both LaTeX and this, but the main points that make this more convenient to me is that it relies less on characters that are present in awkward locations in many keyboard layouts (such as {}) and the equivalent formula is often much shorter due to somewhat more advanced tokenizing (of course, specific to math input, as the format doesn't have the same constraints as a general-purpose programming and markup language), e.g. x^12 works for x to the power of 12 instead of resulting in x^1 2.
robinhouston 8y ago
The author of this paper, Murray Sargent, has a blog at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/
enriquto 8y ago
> All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess... LaTeX is beautiful and powerful, but mixed with unicode (in the right doses) it becomes astonishingly more powerful. For example, you can keep the block constructors {} _ and ^, but use unicode symbols such as α, ∂, ∫, instead of \alpha, \partial, \int
- guipsp 8y ago
  But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard.
  - knolan 8y ago
    You can on a Mac. Holding the option key allows typing a whole host of symbols. https://beebom.com/how-type-hidden-mac-keyboard-symbols/ https://beebom.com/how-type-hidden-mac-keyboard-symbols/
    - guipsp 8y ago
      Right, and you can do the same on linux with the compose key. But it isn't very intuitive, discoverable or rememberable.
      - enriquto 8y ago
        > you can do the same on linux with the compose key. But it isn't very intuitive, discoverable or rememberable. Well, LaTeX itself is not very discoverable either
        knolan 8y ago
        It’s pretty good IMHO. Greek symbols are all obvious. \Omega and \omega for upper and lowercase omega etc. Super and subscripts with ^{} and _{} also work with \sum and \int for indices and intervals. Software like Latexit and Mathpix also help a lot.
      - slrz 8y ago

jcagalawan 8y ago

It's the same one as implemented in MS Word (and PowerPoint, OneNote), this standard was written by an engineer who is on the Math in Office team and maintains a blog [1]. It's the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've used so far. LaTeX has its place, but it's hard to convince non-coders to use it and I'm glad it has the editor. I stumbled into this specification trying to format a constrained optimization problem and found the equation array format to be fairly straightforward similar to the bmatrix environment in LaTeX and thought it was neat that Unicode could represent so much math. [1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/

ygra 8y ago
It should also be noted that Murray Sargent didn't just do whatever he thought of. He has done at least one math layout engine before, consulted with Donald Knuth regarding TeX and some choices that were made back then and a lot of the differences between this and TeX have a fairly sensible reason. For me, I'm able to use both LaTeX and this, but the main points that make this more convenient to me is that it relies less on characters that are present in awkward locations in many keyboard layouts (such as {}) and the equivalent formula is often much shorter due to somewhat more advanced tokenizing (of course, specific to math input, as the format doesn't have the same constraints as a general-purpose programming and markup language), e.g. x^12 works for x to the power of 12 instead of resulting in x^1 2.

robinhouston 8y ago

The author of this paper, Murray Sargent, has a blog at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/

enriquto 8y ago

> All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess... LaTeX is beautiful and powerful, but mixed with unicode (in the right doses) it becomes astonishingly more powerful. For example, you can keep the block constructors {} _ and ^, but use unicode symbols such as α, ∂, ∫, instead of \alpha, \partial, \int

guipsp 8y ago
But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard.
- knolan 8y ago
  You can on a Mac. Holding the option key allows typing a whole host of symbols. https://beebom.com/how-type-hidden-mac-keyboard-symbols/ https://beebom.com/how-type-hidden-mac-keyboard-symbols/
  - guipsp 8y ago
    Right, and you can do the same on linux with the compose key. But it isn't very intuitive, discoverable or rememberable.
    - enriquto 8y ago
      > you can do the same on linux with the compose key. But it isn't very intuitive, discoverable or rememberable. Well, LaTeX itself is not very discoverable either
      - knolan 8y ago
        It’s pretty good IMHO. Greek symbols are all obvious. \Omega and \omega for upper and lowercase omega etc. Super and subscripts with ^{} and _{} also work with \sum and \int for indices and intervals. Software like Latexit and Mathpix also help a lot.
    - slrz 8y ago