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I'm excited for the project, but disappointed that they kept the arcane syntax of TeX/LaTeX. Math expressions are hideous to write and read in LaTeX syntax.
by Timwi 4y ago
I'm excited for the project, but disappointed that they kept the arcane syntax of TeX/LaTeX. Math expressions are hideous to write and read in LaTeX syntax.
- arjvik 4y agoI actually love the TeX syntax for math! What I do hate about LaTeX is the arcane document formatting options—i.e. drawing a figure in place requires an entire package to be imported!
- r0uv3n 4y agoWeird, for me it's entirely the other way around. At least there exists a package for drawing a figure in place, but consistently defining and using semantic commands for math is pretty much impossible. Whenever I'm able to actually use semantic commands, I can write LaTeX math pretty much as quickly as I can write math by hand, but getting these commands to work has been a consistently terrible experience for me.
- mapierce2 4y agoArcane, but I wouldn't say hideous. What's wrong with \alpha for α or \sum for Σ? Do you have a better idea than this?
- dash2 4y agoI feel that the answer to your question is right there in your question.
- jltsiren 4y agoYou probably meant ∑ (\sum) rather than Σ (\Sigma). The two are different symbols, and they are sometimes used in the same expressions. For example, in the field I (used to) work, a sum over all characters in the alphabet would be written as \sum_{c \in \Sigma}. Mathematical syntax is complex, and the typesetting often becomes unreadable outside trivial cases. Using Unicode won't help much, especially because it's easy to confuse similar-looking but unrelated symbols. Proper syntax highlighting might help, but I've never seen a tool doing a good job with it.
- Timwi 4y agoThe first obviously-better idea is to use a/b instead of \frac{a}{b} and (x) instead of \left(x\right). The next obvious improvement is to allow (not require — allow) me to write α instead of \alpha, ∈ instead of \in, and ≤ instead of... whatever the code for that was.
- alerque 4y agoSILE can also read XML or Markdown. I use it for publishing books from Markdown via Pandoc (there are several paths from Markdown→SILE). And for the record the native SIL syntax resembles TeX at first blush but is actually vastly simpler because it is regular and uses a smaller set of possible syntax variations. If you don't like the look or feel of the syntax you can use something else for your source format and provide your own reader that generates a document AST.