2 ms·

This is pretty much how I always wanted formulas in my notes to look like (but was too lazy to implement it myself, I guess). It's not even so much about fast i

by krick 2y ago

This is pretty much how I always wanted formulas in my notes to look like (but was too lazy to implement it myself, I guess). It's not even so much about fast input, it's about that it needs to be at least somewhat readable in plain text (not rendered), which LaTeX certainly isn't. Typing greek letters and stuff is not really a problem with XCompose, but TeX-based tools are too dumb to render "naïve" expressions pretty. I am not sure why: it seems not a huge computational task to figure out that ] is a `\right]`, and it's not like I often need to use `\left]` anyway. And while rendering `(a+b)/a` as a `\frac` is opinionated, honestly, the only reason why this occurs in my notes is when I was too lazy to type `\frac{}{}`. I want this to be the default (or at least an option) in all markdown text editors (obsidian, github, etc.) I mean, as an intermediate: in the end MathJax rendering is much prettier than plain MathML.

jks 2y ago
> it seems not a huge computational task to figure out that ] is a `\right]` TeX's design was finalised in 1982, when the computational resources were different by a few orders of magnitude. There is a very strong culture of backward compatibility (search for "A torture test for TeX") and there are so many equations written in TeX documents that it would be impossible to change the parsing now. That said, something like MathJax would be free to create their own TeX-like syntax where parentheses are automatically paired. I for one often find myself wanting more control, writing `\bigr]` or `\biggr]` instead of `\right]` to get the rendered equation to look good. > And while rendering `(a+b)/a` as a `\frac` is opinionated, honestly, the only reason why this occurs in my notes is when I was too lazy to type `\frac{}{}`. Plain TeX has the much nicer syntax `{a+b \over a}` but for some obscure reason LaTeX recommends against that.

by krick 2y ago

jks 2y ago

> it seems not a huge computational task to figure out that ] is a `\right]` TeX's design was finalised in 1982, when the computational resources were different by a few orders of magnitude. There is a very strong culture of backward compatibility (search for "A torture test for TeX") and there are so many equations written in TeX documents that it would be impossible to change the parsing now. That said, something like MathJax would be free to create their own TeX-like syntax where parentheses are automatically paired. I for one often find myself wanting more control, writing `\bigr]` or `\biggr]` instead of `\right]` to get the rendered equation to look good. > And while rendering `(a+b)/a` as a `\frac` is opinionated, honestly, the only reason why this occurs in my notes is when I was too lazy to type `\frac{}{}`. Plain TeX has the much nicer syntax `{a+b \over a}` but for some obscure reason LaTeX recommends against that.