Markdown Is Not LaTeX

https://www.iconoclasts.blog/joe/markdown-is-not-latex

by joesuf4 • 2 months ago

13 37 2 months ago

zyuiop• 2 months ago

Strange rant. From a user perspective, it is very handy to have a very simple text format in which you can occasionally insert complex mathematical expressions. And at the same time, it's perfectly okay for most implementations to NOT support this syntax

joesuf420• 2 months ago

I guess you qualify as one of those sycophants I spoke of towards the end.

AndrewDucker• 2 months ago

If you want to persuade people of your point then this kind of reply isn't going to do a good job of that.

gandhiandy69• 2 months ago

flexagoon2• 2 months ago

Feels like a weird hill to die on. I don't think I've had a single issue with single dollar signs being math block boundaries. It's also weird to say that Github is the one who invented this or that it was a malicious choice, when it's clearly MathJax, which is far from being "antiquated ugly crapware". It is still used by Wikipedia, most scientific websites, etc. Yes, KaTeX may have advantages, but MathJax is very much alive.

There is a myriad of different software which uses different math delimeters. Some markdown flavors for example use , which is probably the worst of them to use. Is that also malicious?

A much better rant about math syntax in Markdown would be that all flavours still use the LaTeX syntax instead of the very obviously superior Typst one. If you think not embracing Katex instead of Mathjax early enough is a malicious choice, then is this one malicious as well?

joesuf420• 2 months ago

Wrong. As the article states, MathJax has nothing to do with Markdown. Never did. For that matter, neither did KaTeX. It just inteprets text some grammar parser delivers to it and delivers MathML.

The embrace and extend problem appears when you incorporate LaTeX’s grammar into Markdown.

joesuf420• 2 months ago

Perhaps I should say syntax, but really how are you supposed to know what is meant when someone writes $1.50, $2.00 or $\text{more}$.

professoretc• 2 months ago

Some markdown flavors for example use , which is probably the worst of them to use.

Some markdown flavors say they use `` but they also use `\` as the escape character, so in practice you have to use `\$\$` which is definitely the worst.

joesuf420• 2 months ago

Just use double-dollar for everything as the Editor.md developers originally introduced in 2015. Simple, painless, and intelligent.

Using a single-dollar is asinine.

applicative8• 2 months ago

Pandoc’s specific markdown has had these for 20 years. They are from latex itself not mathjax. You’d think the list would have talked him out of it if it was a problem. What legit use of $ as ‘dollar’ is missed by this spec?

8.13.1 Extension: tex_math_dollars
Anything between two $ characters will be treated as TeX math. The opening $ must have a non-space character immediately to its right, while the closing $ must have a non-space character immediately to its left, and must not be followed immediately by a digit. Thus, $20,000 and $30,000 won’t parse as math. If for some reason you need to enclose text in literal $ characters, backslash-escape them and they won’t be treated as math delimiters.

joesuf420• 2 months ago

Naive, and cloistered. Not a great look. Maybe 5 people and their friends use Pandoc, so it doesn’t have to be robust.

joesuf420• 2 months ago

If it really was this simple GitHub would have publicized this spec instead of being intentionally vague and opaque about it.

But you know what’s best.

apnorton2• 2 months ago

Maybe 5 people and their friends use Pandoc

The pandoc repository[1] has nearly 45k stars and 4k forks. It's embedded in Jupyter notebooks, which are used by data scientists the world over. The python wrapper for pandoc has 16 million downloads[2].

[1] https://github.com/jgm/pandoc [2]: https://pypi.org/project/pandoc/

applicative8• 2 months ago

==> pandoc : stable 3.9.0.2 (bottled), HEAD

Swiss-army knife of markup format conversion

https://pandoc.org/

Installed (on request)

From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/...

License: GPL-2.0-or-later

==> Installed Kegs and Versions

pandoc 3.9.0.2 (11 files, 274.7MB) [Linked]

==> Dependencies

Required (1): gmp

Recursive Runtime (1): all installed

==> Analytics

install: 31,898 (30 days), 119,598 (90 days), 369,388 (365 days)

Markdown Is Not LaTeX

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