I wish there was an entire LaTeX-like templating language. Not just the math typesetting; the typesetting is, for the most part, raw TeX.
Markdown is very deficient in, say, organizing a blog post in several sections and subsections. There's formatting syntax, but not semantic syntax. No support for different styling at a higher level (in the template renderer); no support for generating indexes, footnotes.
(The state of footnotes on the web in 2014 is lamentable).
All these valiant efforts in having portable math typesetting that like to make puns with "LaTeX" fall regrettably short of enabling one to make a short blogpost detailing a mathematical curiosity, or even heavily-referenced semi-scholarly output. LaTeX is a template engine that happens to leverage a programmable typesetter. We have a programmable typesetter with modern JavaScript, can we focus on semantic templating already?
If only we had some sort of standard, perhaps XML based syntax which is both standardised and well supported cross-browser, doesn't need JavaScript except for a few enhancements as and when it's needed.
This reminds me of a comment[0] by a math grad student, Chao Xu, who extended markdown documents parsed by pandoc to ennumerate Proofs, Lemmas, etc., leading to blog posts that feel like part of a math text. One starts with a line beginning with, e.g., {proof}, and any content that follows and is indented (until non-indented text) is included with this section.
EDIT: also wanted to add that most markdown parsers that I've used (pandoc, python markdown) have support for footnotes and tables, though footnotes are compiled at the end of the document instead of at the end of individual 'sections' or 'subsections', which is a major pain for longer documents.
Comments
I wish there was an entire LaTeX-like templating language. Not just the math typesetting; the typesetting is, for the most part, raw TeX.
Markdown is very deficient in, say, organizing a blog post in several sections and subsections. There's formatting syntax, but not semantic syntax. No support for different styling at a higher level (in the template renderer); no support for generating indexes, footnotes.
(The state of footnotes on the web in 2014 is lamentable).
All these valiant efforts in having portable math typesetting that like to make puns with "LaTeX" fall regrettably short of enabling one to make a short blogpost detailing a mathematical curiosity, or even heavily-referenced semi-scholarly output. LaTeX is a template engine that happens to leverage a programmable typesetter. We have a programmable typesetter with modern JavaScript, can we focus on semantic templating already?
If only we had some sort of standard, perhaps XML based syntax which is both standardised and well supported cross-browser, doesn't need JavaScript except for a few enhancements as and when it's needed.
This reminds me of a comment[0] by a math grad student, Chao Xu, who extended markdown documents parsed by pandoc to ennumerate Proofs, Lemmas, etc., leading to blog posts that feel like part of a math text. One starts with a line beginning with, e.g., {proof}, and any content that follows and is indented (until non-indented text) is included with this section.
EDIT: also wanted to add that most markdown parsers that I've used (pandoc, python markdown) have support for footnotes and tables, though footnotes are compiled at the end of the document instead of at the end of individual 'sections' or 'subsections', which is a major pain for longer documents.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913498