Markdown Is Not LaTeX | Hacker News Reader

Markdown Is Not LaTeX

iconoclasts.blog

13 pointsjoesuf437 comments

Feels like a weird hill to die on. I don't think I've had a single issue with single dollar signs being math block boundaries. It's also weird to say that Github is the one who invented this or that it was a malicious choice, when it's clearly MathJax, which is far from being "antiquated ugly crapware". It is still used by Wikipedia, most scientific websites, etc. Yes, KaTeX may have advantages, but MathJax is very much alive.

There is a myriad of different software which uses different math delimeters. Some markdown flavors for example use , which is probably the worst of them to use. Is that also malicious?

A much better rant about math syntax in Markdown would be that all flavours still use the LaTeX syntax instead of the very obviously superior Typst one. If you think not embracing Katex instead of Mathjax early enough is a malicious choice, then is this one malicious as well?

Wrong. As the article states, MathJax has nothing to do with Markdown. Never did. For that matter, neither did KaTeX. It just inteprets text some grammar parser delivers to it and delivers MathML.

The embrace and extend problem appears when you incorporate LaTeX’s grammar into Markdown.

Perhaps I should say syntax, but really how are you supposed to know what is meant when someone writes $1.50, $2.00 or $\text{more}$.

Besides, nobody gives a crap about Wikipedia file formats. They are not specs that others may implement independently.

GFM is a spec, not a vendor format.

original gruber-swartz markdown has no spec, just perl program with many comical corner cases.

The spec is linked to in the article. Do you know how to click on a link, or do you use Braille?

That is an overview of the syntax the program supports. It's not even remotely a formal specification.

Yawn.

there is absolutely no specification. one who thinks there is has no idea what such words actually mean. thousands have burned their brains on this question

There is absolutely no point to your post. We are discussing GFM, which is also linked to in the article you didn't read.

Its good they cancelled this thread. In fact I read the post, which shows you are completely ignorant of the history of markdowns and the various basically scientific problems they have posed. Thus e.g. commonmark, the basis of gfm, was devised in consortium between github, pandoc (whose author composed the specification) and assorted other well known markdowns.

Ok, sycophant

> Some markdown flavors for example use , which is probably the worst of them to use.

Some markdown flavors say they use `` but they also use `\` as the escape character, so in practice you have to use `\$\$` which is definitely the worst.

Just use double-dollar for everything as the Editor.md developers originally introduced in 2015. Simple, painless, and intelligent.

Using a single-dollar is asinine.

Strange rant. From a user perspective, it is very handy to have a very simple text format in which you can occasionally insert complex mathematical expressions. And at the same time, it's perfectly okay for most implementations to NOT support this syntax

I guess you qualify as one of those sycophants I spoke of towards the end.

If you want to persuade people of your point then this kind of reply isn't going to do a good job of that.

I’m an engineer, not an influencer.

Learn the difference by dealing with substance, not personability.

You should lead with substance then. Instead you joined the discussion here with a polemic statement.

Idiotic take. Clearly you didn’t click on the link.

Besides, I updated the article for clueless people like you, so give it another shot.

Updated again, and translated to 11 languages besides English.

Peace.

Pandoc’s specific markdown has had these for 20 years. They are from latex itself not mathjax. You’d think the list would have talked him out of it if it was a problem. What legit use of $ as ‘dollar’ is missed by this spec?

> 8.13.1 Extension: tex_math_dollars

> Anything between two $ characters will be treated as TeX math. The opening $ must have a non-space character immediately to its right, while the closing $ must have a non-space character immediately to its left, and must not be followed immediately by a digit. Thus, $20,000 and $30,000 won’t parse as math. If for some reason you need to enclose text in literal $ characters, backslash-escape them and they won’t be treated as math delimiters.

Naive, and cloistered. Not a great look. Maybe 5 people and their friends use Pandoc, so it doesn’t have to be robust.

If it really was this simple GitHub would have publicized this spec instead of being intentionally vague and opaque about it.

But you know what’s best.

The spec is the commonmark spec together with extensions of the type the commonmark spec was devised to make possible. People know better than to leave such a 'language' with a 'spec' that only really resides in a perl program, of all things. There are lists upon lists upon lists of corner cases the the perl does differently from every other program that, in the first years, reimplemented it. All of them show the perl does not meet the intention.

You are such a bore. Read the motivating preamble in Gruber's spec- that's the part the GFM standardization process stayed faithful to.

Up until Microsoft got involved.

> Maybe 5 people and their friends use Pandoc

The pandoc repository[1] has nearly 45k stars and 4k forks. It's embedded in Jupyter notebooks, which are used by data scientists the world over. The python wrapper for pandoc has 16 million downloads[2].

[1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc [2]: https://pypi.org/project/pandoc/

Great, but Jupyter notebooks aren’t written in Markdown.

Next?

They are, though. [1]

But maybe that's insufficient. Hugo[2], one of the most widespread static site generators in existence, supports Pandoc markdown flavors as well as general GFM.[3]

[1]: https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/N...

[2]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo

[3]: https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/

They are not supported by GitHub’s GFM, and you are being incredibly bad faith about this fact.

If you are comfortable calling Markdown a futile exercise in avoiding proprietary control of a universal, simple document format for wide interoperability across natural languages, programming languages, and monopoly interests, then you and I are Microsoft vs Sun over Java in the 1990s.

The original Gruber-Shwartz format, which is in fact fundamentally a perl program attached to a brief expression of its intention, is not used by anyone except those who still use the perl program. Every other implementation avoids thousands of corner cases present in the perl, while of course producing its own.

Boring, useless content. You must love the sound of your own voice when you read back the nonsequiturs you have offered in this comment section.

==> pandoc : stable 3.9.0.2 (bottled), HEAD

Swiss-army knife of markup format conversion

https://pandoc.org/

Installed (on request)

From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/...

License: GPL-2.0-or-later

==> Installed Kegs and Versions

pandoc 3.9.0.2 (11 files, 274.7MB) [Linked]

==> Dependencies

Required (1): gmp

Recursive Runtime (1): all installed

==> Analytics

install: 31,898 (30 days), 119,598 (90 days), 369,388 (365 days)

Yawn. Nobody uses it to parse GFM unless they are over 60.

It is used almost entirely with gfm, the operation of gfm was in consultation. it was in this connection that the commonmark specification was formulated.

Seven years ago? Who cares?

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