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...