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Comment by ephimetheus | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it, why not just use LaTeX? The syntax is already almost the same anyway..

"$$x+\frac{32}{2}$$" is not "almost the same" as "x+32/2".

Using / instead of \frac is by far the biggest difference, so it is "almost the same".

Just wanted to point out that this is not friendly for beginners. A beginner will be lost between a lot of "\frac"s and "{}"s (I don't know the name in English, sorry). Been there

{} are "brackets"/"curly brackets" :)

Thanks! :)

No, [ ] are brackets; { } are braces.

(Disambiguating with an adjective does make it ok to use either -- "Curly brackets" are still { }, and "square braces" are still [ ] )

No, they aren't. () are brackets, [] are square brackets, {} are curly brackets. 'Brackets' always refers to () unless specifically you say 'square'.

Stop imposing your stupid American stuff on people.

I agree with your content, but not your tone. I'd like to add that one often hears "round brackets" as an unambiguous terms for the first category. And where's love for angle brackets <chevrons>?

There are substantially more Americans than people in any other English-speaking country, and, to top it off, we're on an American forum.

It's not "stupid" to assume the dialect we're using is American English. Why the aggressiveness?

Because the cultural ignorance you are showing is annoying. There are vastly more people speaking english in the world than there are US Americans. On top of that: Most of the Americans are speaking spanish and portuguese. America != US America for one.

The problem is that this is a really tiny subset of what you can write with LaTeX, even for high school students it won't be enough. I'd much rather use something like https://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php as a beginner.

Yep - even 'min' is missing. `min_` becomes `m \in _`, seemingly no way to force it to work, `{min}` or `\min` don't.

No, they won't.

"x+32/2" and "x+\frac{32}{2}" do different things in LaTeX, but both are correct.

To be fair, this solution replaces the "$$" with several 10s of kilobytes of javascript.

That's what I was confused about. This is almost exactly LaTeX. The major difference is no "\". And it adds unneeded \left, \right, and just braces everywhere.

The biggest differences is in this example, I looked at all of them:

f'(x) = lim_{h -> 0} {f(x+h) - f(x)}/h

f'(x) = \lim_{h\to 0}\frac{f(x+h) - f(x)}{h}

While the code it produces is way more than needed. See [1] for the crap it produces.

The key differences here are "\", "->" instead of "\to" (which \to makes more sense to me), and "/" instead of "\frac{}{}" (which I'll give to Mathify). But because LaTeX supports a lot more there is no question which one is actually easier.

[1] {f'{ \left( x \right) } = \lim _{{h \to 0}} \frac{{f{ \left( x+h \right) } - f{ \left( x \right) }}}{h}}

I mainly made it for stuff like division where you have to type in \frac{}{} every time. So instead of typing \frac{x}{3} you can just type x/3 and get the same result.

Often I do want to output x/3; is there a way to do that here?

Sorry I haven't thought of a good solution for that yet, but if you really want to write a / you can do: "x text{/} 3"

Maybe some simple quoting scheme for "literals"?

I was surprised to learn just the other week that `\frac x3` will give what you want, in Latex.

I remember being surprised when I first saw \frac12, and I was like "that works?". The response I got was "of course". In retrospect, I admit that's the right answer: once you get TeX well enough, it's obvious.

This works for a lot of stuff. If you are only giving one input it'll work. So things like "\sin x", "x^2" \frac12" work. Interestingly you need a space in the sin example but not in the others. But "x^12" is the same as "x^{1} 2". So be careful with the shortcut.

It's not surprising if you know how TeX lexes things, which you should never ever learn.

"why not just use LaTeX?"

Augment. Why not let the silicon do the grunt work of remembering latex and let the user get on with the job?

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