TeXMe Self-rendering Markdown and LaTeX documents | Hacker News Reader

TeXMe Self-rendering Markdown and LaTeX documents

github.com

77 pointsharporoeder15 comments

Another similar script is http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ which has a pretty wide set of features for ASCII art. With some slight tweaking, it can be used to embed markdown inside normal HTML+JS docs so I've been using it for some of my personal notes.

Markdeep supports MathJax as well.

What a great idea. This lets me skip the md->html conversion step. Which means I can edit equations interactively by just cmd-R'ing in the browser, and share md files with people without telling them what tool to use to render.

This script could be automatically injected before .md files using the nginx directive add_before_body. An instant static site of markdown files with no preprocessing step.

    location ~* /markdown/.*\.md$ {
      add_before_body "/markdown/header.html";
      types {}
      default_type text/html;
    }

And a little bit of CSS to keep the line breaks if the JS is disabled:

    <!DOCTYPE html><script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/texme@0.7.0"></script>
    <style>body > main { white-space: normal; }</style>
    <body style="white-space: pre-line;">

A lot of these scripts that focus on rendering just wrap around mathjax/katex and md processors that do the actual heavy lifting. To me the real innovation needed to advance math authoring lies in processing cross references. Browser tech has yet to be fully utilized to present arguments in a manner that best facilitates reading instead of the linear fashion that comes from the constraint of printed documents. To be sure there are some work done in this direction in online open textbooks, but the tools and formats are too heavy for wide adoption.

Wondering what you have in mind ? Deep linking to other papers for example ?

For example like an IDE one should be able to easily see definitions defined somewhere else. Right now it is doable only if an author spends a lot of manual effort.

http://perma.pub/alpha/edward/openZRe7/fulfil

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491587

(Make sure you're viewing in a fullscreen browser window.)

You mean like how Wikipedia renders the beginning of a page if you hover over a link in a wiki page?

Sure floating tooltips or "show and hide" buttons are possible ways to let one preview cross reference within current context instead of leaving the page. This would reduce friction and memory load. This book https://mphitchman.com/geometry/ extensively uses this and other (inline exercises, e.g.) through the pretext markup scheme and tools. As a first step it would be nice to have some of these features working in the more popular md schemes. But I also happen to think that it is possible to go beyond. Math could use a better semantic markup that enables better presentation of underlying structures in addition to pretty tex formulaes.

I would like to see a math equation traceback. Like for a stochastic model of animal population distribution you might have something like

p_ih = p_0exp[(ad_ih)^c + (b*s_star)^e]

and it would be really nice if you could just see the traceback on everything, like you click on s_star and it takes you to the definition

s_star = (s_max - s_h)/(s_max - s_min)

and you can keep going until you are done. I guess I'm just tlaking about a wiki at this point but the focus would be on integrating the definitions into the equation itself so that when you read it in a textbook or whatever you can see where the ultimate comes from.

I really liked this because it's easy to save that line as a snippet in your text editor. It's a process of creating a new html file, inserting the snippet, and typing away.

Unfortunately, my usage came to a quick end when I discovered dollar signs in code are treated as math. It would have to switch from the Commonmark library to something like markdown-it that has a full set of features.

Hi Lance (@bachmeier),

Thank you for reporting this issue and especially for posting your investigation details on this issue at https://github.com/susam/texme/issues/9.

I have now added support for a special purpose environment named "md" to TeXMe. This environment protects LaTeX delimiters ($, $$, etc.) within Markdown code blocks and code spans. More details about this feature is available at the following two URLs:

- https://github.com/susam/texme/issues/9#issuecomment-6994876...

- https://github.com/susam/texme/blob/6213f86/README.md#markdo...

Does it support linking to another file in the same directory ?

Yes, it does. Plain Markdown links and HTML links remain intact and behave normally. Here is an example:

  <!DOCTYPE html><script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/texme@0.7.0"></script><textarea>

  # Euler's Identity

  In mathematics, **Euler's identity** is the equality
  $$ e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0. $$

  To read more, [click here](bar.html).

The last line in the above example contains a link to a file named bar.html in the same directory.

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