But it is still far more cumbersome (and looks ugly) than writing formulas by hand. And after a while, you learn things like "underscore is for subscript" and "^ is for superscript".īut the point is, mathematics written as a plaintext document needs an interpreter, unless you have been writing papers with math notation for some years. It's the nicest way to produce nice looking mathematics PDFs or MathJax, if you have a powerful text editor. I don't recommend picking up TeX notation for reading maths in plaintext. I've been using LaTeX for about 5 years now. The biggest player right now is the Wolfram language, of course, but that can look terribly unwieldy too. This may or may not be true, but if it is true then TeX is not going to survive the death of images, precisely because it is a programming language for a class of images. ![]() The contention of the original link posted is, all of these image-based formats like PDF and lecture videos are going away. TeX claims to be a typesetting and layout system, and it does that well it's not trying to be a universal mathematical notation. If TeX were the CAS that it doesn't claim to be, as far as it's concerned that expression could be canonically refactored to `\iint d^2fxy(x,y),` since no one wrapped the `dx` and `dy` in curly braces. The fact that it's an image-based representation makes it very easy to switch from `\int_A dx~\int_B dy~f(x,y)` to `\iint_ dx~dy~f(x,y).` However let's not mistake the fact that TeX does not know and does not want to know how you are using the `\int` and `\iint` symbols, is 100% OK with omitting those `~` characters, and has no semantic conception of what `dx` and `dy` are. I'm not saying it can't be used for this context, of course it can, I have used it a ton and found it quite enjoyable. TeX can be understood best as a concise way of writing a certain class of vector images, and when you are reading TeX you are reading a computer program which generates an image. Put another way: the best way to understand what an arbitrary mathematical expression in LaTeX really means, is to render it as an image and read that image. But TeX is a joke for mathematical notation in particular. I mean, it's not a joke for its intended purpose that's fine. So perhaps my takeaway is, write in something readable that compiles to something widely available. The docs of mine that seem most resilient to platform shifts (other than plaintext) are the ones that are written in or compiled to longstanding formats like LaTeX or HTML. Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, except when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables. ![]() ![]() generating a table of contents, image tags, etc). I've been getting so tired of having to re-do stuff on different platforms that more of my docs are starting as Plaintext and then written in pseudocode markup for areas that I know will change on every platform (e.g. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc. With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. ![]() Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write.
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