Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

I use LaTeX for notetaking as a blind person because that's the only way to show my notes to sighted people. Nothing else comes even close. Ascimath would be much better and that's what I'd recommend for most people, unless you're required to send PDF documents and often offline.

View on HN

Thanks for the ascimath reference. Do you know of any similar technologies for writing equations in a simpler and more readable form than latex?

I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a "simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support, easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable.

https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3

or for documentation:

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...

eqn (part of troff) from 1974, predating TeX, had a very decent syntax! It's not as complete as TeX, and the layout quality is worse, and I wouldn't want to touch the rest of troff syntax. So not really practical, but good inspiration.

Open/LibreOffice math formulas use a syntax that's clearly inspired by it. Unfortunately it's very lacking in documentation.

Another important question is are you looking for presentational or semantic math? For presentational fine tuning I'm afraid nothing can beat the flexibility of TeX combined with a huge body of Q&A (on stack exchange and elsewhere)...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com