All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...
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.
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
I can already do it, to some extent, for instance, this is the summation equation from page 5 in the pdf above:
ₙ ⎛n⎞
(a + b)ⁿ = ∑ ⎜ ⎟ aᵏbⁿ⁻ᵏ
ᵏ⁼⁰ ⎝k⎠
Worse, there is basically only one free monospaced font that will display all of those characters (DejaVu Sans Mono) and even that doesn't cover all the symbols I might want to use. For instance, I use the "entails" symbol a lot and that renders as a ⊨ in DejaVu Sans Mono, so I have to put it togehter with what I got: |= or \= for the negative.
Each of the methods discussed in the pdf above (as far as I've read in it, which is not too far) are far from ideal. They're all markups, so they all require at least some mental rendering. Why can't I have a script that lets me write each special symbol as one character, or at worse, a few of them like for the large parens, above?
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Edit: And you'll need to set your broswer's font to a monospaced font to see the equation above properly :/
Unicode maintains the position that plain text is unsuitable for this sort of thing and markup languages are preferred. That's also why there are no "formatting" modifiers except in cases where the result actually has different semantics that are important to distinguish (cf. RTL and LTR override). Overall I'd say Unicode does a fairly good job keeping too weirdness out of the standard. Emoji are obviously a much-contended addition, albeit one that already had a history of existence and widespread use in plain-text. And while you find all symbols needed for math rendering in Unicode, some of the weirder ones sometimes came from older character encodings and their existence does not mean that full math markup should be part of Unicode.
Well, I think that's an unreasonable position. The most intuitive way to enter mathematical text with a keyboard is to enter the symbols you want to enter, directly, as characters. I mean, nobody asks me, as a Greek speaker, to enter (hypothetical markup) \{greek_letter_xi} for χ or \{greek_letter_ypsilon} for υ, etc, thank the gods. Why do I have to use markup for the simplest things, like fractions and exponentials?
All symbols for math may be in Unicode, but there is no font supporting all of them. It's not Unicode that's at fault here, of course.
The idea is to combine an efficient onscreen structure with key presses typed by the left hand. So press q,w,e, etcetera to select.
Currently I'm looking at MathML and Tex support, would anyone who uses Math daily be interested in UTF-8 support?
My instinct tells me that this UTF solution seems like a nightmare.
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/richard-ja...
https://github.com/richard-jansson/roosevelt/
It's possible to input into the os, leave a comment of you're interested.
This format is mostly geared towards input as well, in that you have defined automatic replacements as well as a format that can be typed easily and be built up to rendered math during typing. If you have your own completely different input method you wouldn't gain much from this.
Constantia pairs fairly well with Cambria as well, though.
What (latex compatible) fonts do you like/recommend then?
In my opinion, it's kind of sad to see how strongly Computer Modern dominates the font choices in latex (and more generally the latex monoculture).
(Full disclosure: it's my thread)
Otherwise I'm currently using XeLaTeX (if I use LaTeX at all), so I'm not limited to compatible fonts and anything that's OpenType works.
this is is not the world where everybody lives. I live mostly in the world of math books, where all variables are single letters (which is the main difference here, and not the use of unicode). I tend to find code written by non-mathematicians ridiculous and unreadable.
Instead of
E = m * c^2
thing->Energy = thing->Mass() * np.math.pow(lib.constants.speedOfLightInVacuum,2) thing->Energy = thing->Mass() * pow(speedOfLightInVacuum, 2)
auto mass = thing->Mass();
auto c = speedOfLightInVacuum;
thing->Energy = mass * pow(c, 2);
// or thing->Energy = mass * c * c;
// or thing->Energy = mass * c**2; (for languages that support it)
You're not wrong: it's a definite flaw of many programming styles (and programmers!) that they're "too wordy". But it's also true that mathematics can get by with a bit of ambiguity that humans can handle that computers can't.
The problem then occurs when you work in a multidisciplinary group and 'everybody' wants to use 'p' or 'c' or whatever mean the the super obvious thing it means in their field and you have to remember what each letter means in 6 different fields and the 'p' in function f means something completely different from the 'p' in function g.
And that's OK. The 'x' in mathematics means completely different things depending on the equation. That's what comments are for, to explain the meaning of the local variables on each function.
// E: energy of the thing
// m: mass of the thing
// c: constant representing the speed of light in vacuum
E = m * c^2
So, for example, xˆy could be written as x superscript y. SUM[i<-1:n, j<-1:p, prime j] a[i] xˆj was more elegant as a big sigma with the ranges at the bottom, etc.
The big disadvantage to LyX is that it's not LaTeX editor but a LaTeX generator. So if you want to write your next article or dissertation and can commit to it then it's great, but if you want to import work so far or collaborate with someone not using LyX then it doesn't really work (it has an import function but it's almost unusable).
Once you've done that once in the session, you can just hit C-\ to toggle it on and off (C-x RET C-\ [input method] actually lets you select from a wide variety of input methods, and C-\ toggles on and off the most recently selected input method).
Greek letters are always a latin letter followed by an asterisk. Arrows and comparison operators are what one would guess. Mathematical symbols generally make some sense:
<C-k> a * α
<C-k> F * Φ
<C-k> = > ⇒
<C-k> - > →
<C-k> > = ≥
<C-k> 0 0 ∞
<C-k> d P ∂
<C-k> I n ∫
I have a standard keyboard and I type greek letters easily. ALTGR+a, and so on.
If somebody is not able to configure their keyboard to do this they are not probably writing LaTeX, either.
(Admittedly, this anecdata is even more useless than usual.)
As long as you don't need caps lock as your escape key...
It follows a set of rules so you don't have to remember a large number of sequences but can often guess the right one intuitively.
ASCII digraphs for mathematical operators give the corresponding operator, e.g., <= yields ≤.
Greek letters are given by an asterisk followed by a corresponding latin letter, e.g., *d yields δ.
https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man7/keyboard.html
There's a program (mklatinkbd) to convert it to a format usable with X11.
Well, LaTeX itself is not very discoverable either
Ctrl-k a Shift-8
Software like Latexit and Mathpix also help a lot.