Show HN: Mathematics Chalkboard with LaTeX and Markdown Support | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mathematics Chalkboard with LaTeX and Markdown Support

github.com

89 pointssusam23 comments

The output looks cool, but I don't see the point of mixing markdown and latex this way. Why not go for a proper subset of LaTeX? There's really not much of a difference between

        \section{title}

and

        # title

If this is the only "advantage" of Markdown with respect to LaTeX it seems quite feeble... Is there anything else of substance that the Markdown+LaTeX mix allows?

I suppose the point is everything markdown plus LaTeX for anything fancy (+maths) that markdown does not support.

Markdown is easier to use. Markdown extentions like Rmarkdown (Inc. R Notebooks) are a pleasure to use.

markdown is easier to use, but only slightly easier if you already know latex. and if you use latex regularly, switching between markdown and latex syntax on the fly seems strange.

I suppose it's since it doesn't really support LaTeX but instead uses MathJax to render equations.

TeX is a a turing-complete language, picking some random subset of LaTeX commands would feel pretty arbitrary to me. In comparison, supporting full markdown syntax is pretty easy.

I suspect this is probably true. I've been bitten by this before, when journals claim to support LaTeX submissions but their online system breaks utterly if you use the tickz package inline...

To be fair, precisely because of the Turing completeness, it's not in a journal's interest to run whatever totally bizarre code you throw at them—and they do have to run it if they're going to compile your code, which they have to do in order to screw it up to the house style.

but they should support tikz, which is the most common package for making diagrams in latex

Why not? Because it might not terminate in a reasonable time? Being Turing-complete doesn't mean being an attack vector: when reasonably sandboxed, the LaTeX code is still confined to producing an output document, not exfiltrating your secret data or holding you to ransom.

> Because it might not terminate in a reasonable time?

Yes. The publishers are in business for their readers, not their authors, even though those audiences often overlap. If putting a hardship on their authors will help their readers, even in a notional sense—"because of the restrictions we put on TeX documents, the people we need to hire to deal with TeX only have to have basic skills, and so we are better able to concentrate resources elsewhere in the workflow"—then they will. (I'm not defending this choice, just reporting on it. A recent dealing with IMRN made it horrifyingly clear how little their TeXnical staff understands about the most basic TeX.)

> Being Turing-complete doesn't mean being an attack vector: when reasonably sandboxed, the LaTeX code is still confined to producing an output document, not exfiltrating your secret data or holding you to ransom.

Everything is an attack vector, and Turing complete things are even more so. Plenty of people have thought that they have reasonably sandboxed things and found out later that they hadn't. TeX is an incredibly reliable piece of software, and I'm sure great strides have been made in making it also a secure piece of software, but the security features have received much less battle testing and so should be trusted less.

> TeX is a a turing-complete language, picking some random subset of LaTeX commands would feel pretty arbitrary to me.

I'm not sure why Turing completeness makes it easier or harder to choose a subset—perhaps easier, since "make it not Turing complete" should be a guiding principle for anything you compile on behalf of someone else—but MathJax and KaTeX are both pretty good guides for an "acceptable" subset.

During my first year of university I took notes in a Markdown/MathJax static-site-generator monstrosity I wrote during my A-levels. This was in real-time during my lectures, and I didn't feel I'd be able to keep up doing it in LaTeX - it's great for expressing mathematical ideas quickly, but not great when you just want to get formatted text down fast.

I'm now fast enough that I'm able to just take notes in LaTeX directly, but for that first little while, Markdown was a very useful backup.

The other benefit was that Markdown is so easily extensible. I wrote a very small little DSL for expressing graphs, and then had the generator render anything in certain code blocks as a Cytoscape graph which I could interact with in the output pages. Wouldn't even want to try adding that to LaTeX.

> If this is the only "advantage" of Markdown with respect to LaTeX it seems quite feeble... Is there anything else of substance that the Markdown+LaTeX mix allows?

Never underestimate the importance of a thin layer of familiar syntax for easing adoption!

But the meaning of "familiar" syntax is very subjective. In my case the markdown looks strange, like a shell comment. Does it render or is it just a comment? Does a section number appear? At least with LaTeX sectioning I know what will happen.

> But the meaning of "familiar" syntax is very subjective. In my case the markdown looks strange, like a shell comment. Does it render or is it just a comment? Does a section number appear? At least with LaTeX sectioning I know what will happen.

Fair enough. Similarly, the "familiar" GUI interaction paradigm that Outlook Web Access forces on me (to pick an example that's on my mind as I am struggling with it) is much less convenient and familiar to me than a text-based interface as I'd get with Pine. However, we get what is (thought to be) familiar and comfortable to the intended audience, and we might not be the intended audience for the software that we want to use.

It's not 'mixing' so much as taking standard approaches to Markdown, which usually supports LaTeX markup for equations. Pandoc allows LaTeX maths in Markdown conversions, for example.

I really like the look of it! If it were possible to easily turn it into something that could be shared privately and live for collaboration with other people, it would be perfect.

It's not as trendy, but I use LyX regularly in zoom sessions for precisely this. It works really well.

"let me be the guy who points people to an alternative project when someone is trying to present theirs"

I’m glad those guys exist.

It is similar to https://bytemd.netlify.app/ , but styled differently. I suppose, it for use with a projector, where you will be able to hide unwanted content.

This needs pen drawing support. I have not seen a decent web whiteboard suitable for maths. I'm currently using desktop version of [1], and it has many cool features, but having it on web would be so much better.

[1] http://www.styluslabs.com/

> This needs pen drawing support.

No it doesn't.

TeXmacs is another tool that can be used as chalkboard and still very powerful. It deserves more reputation.

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