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Markdown Is Not LaTeX
- zyuiop 4mo agoStrange 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
- joesuf4 4mo agoI guess you qualify as one of those sycophants I spoke of towards the end.
- AndrewDucker 4mo agoIf you want to persuade people of your point then this kind of reply isn't going to do a good job of that.
- gandhiandy69 4mo agoOk
- flexagoon 4mo agoFeels 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?
- joesuf4 4mo agoWrong. 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.
- joesuf4 4mo agoPerhaps I should say syntax, but really how are you supposed to know what is meant when someone writes $1.50, $2.00 or $\text{more}$.
- joesuf4 4mo agoBesides, nobody gives a crap about Wikipedia file formats. They are not specs that others may implement independently. GFM is a spec, not a vendor format.
- applicative 4mo agooriginal gruber-swartz markdown has no spec, just perl program with many comical corner cases.
- applicative 4mo agoPandoc’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.
- joesuf4 4mo agoNaive, and cloistered. Not a great look. Maybe 5 people and their friends use Pandoc, so it doesn’t have to be robust.
- joesuf4 4mo agoIf 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.
- applicative 4mo agoThe spec is the commonmark spec together with extensions of the type the commonmark spec was devised to make possible. People know better than to leave such a 'language' with a 'spec' that only really resides in a perl program, of all things. There are lists upon lists upon lists of corner cases the the perl does differently from every other program that, in the first years, reimplemented it. All of them show the perl does not meet the intention.
- joesuf4 4mo agoYou are such a bore. Read the motivating preamble in Gruber's spec- that's the part the GFM standardization process stayed faithful to. Up until Microsoft got involved.