[Idea] Advanced Line Type: LaTeX

[Alex // nytpu]

On 2021-08-01 07:48PM, Andrew Thorp wrote:
> ```
> $ \frac{1}{2} \text{ Hello from } \LaTeX !
> ```
This specific format would break several of my articles where I
represent shell commands and their output like so:
```
$ unzip capsule.gpub
Archive:  capsule.gpub
  inflating: index.gmi
  inflating: math-gemlog-post.gmi
  inflating: math-gemlog-post-supplement.tex
$ xelatex math-gemlog-post-supplement.tex
...
$ okular math-gemlog-post-supplement.pdf &
```

> Adding soft math support would go a long way in expanding the types of
> content which can usefully be supported by gemini
I think this is yet another situation where serving any MIME type you
want comes in handy.  You can serve LaTeX or PDFs or MathML or HTML w/
MathJax through Gemini perfectly fine and advanced clients could render
them or just pass them through to the users' preferred application.  If
we're going to add markup that requires pulling a full TeX engine into a
client that wants to be fully spec-compliant then we might as well add
groff-style line-based italics and other markup that's more useful for
general-purpose writing than mathematical markup is.

If you really want to have mathematical markup in your gemtext document,
then I'd recommend providing a supplementary .tex file that has nice
versions of all your formulae.  As an alternative, you could add
relatively simple formulae to the gemtext in a style similar to the "ad
hoc Unicode" formulae shown here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_markup_language#Examples
Unicode has like thirteen blocks focused on math so it's not like you'd
be missing out on symbols to choose from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_operators_and_symbols_in_Unicode

~nytpu

-- 
Alex // nytpu
alex at nytpu.com
gpg --locate-external-key alex at nytpu.com
https://useplaintext.email/
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