{"id":1343,"date":"2022-06-30T20:07:20","date_gmt":"2022-06-30T20:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1343"},"modified":"2022-06-30T20:07:20","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T20:07:20","slug":"markdown-replace-latex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/markdown-replace-latex\/","title":{"rendered":"Markdown isn&#8217;t good enough to replace LaTeX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am generally sympathetic with calls to replace LaTeX with something else. LaTeX has\u00a0<strong><em>terrible<\/em><\/strong> defaults, Unicode and font support is a constant problem, the syntax is deliberately obfuscatory, and actual generation is painfully slow (probably because the whole thing is a big pasta factory of interpreted code instead of a single static library).<\/p>\r\n<p>But at the same time, I don&#8217;t think Markdown is really good enough for LaTeX. Of course one can use Pandoc to generate LaTeX from Markdown notes, and its output is often a decent thing to copy and paste into your LaTeX document. But Markdown just doesn&#8217;t solve\u00a0<em>any<\/em> of the issues I mention, except making the syntax a tad more WYSIWYG than it would be otherwise. And Markdown is quite a bit worse at one thing: the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markdownguide.org\/extended-syntax\/\">extended syntax for tables<\/a> is very hard to key in and still much less expressive than LaTeX&#8217;s actually pretty rational tabular environment.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am generally sympathetic with calls to replace LaTeX with something else. LaTeX has\u00a0terrible defaults, Unicode and font support is a constant problem, the syntax is deliberately obfuscatory, and actual generation is painfully slow (probably because the whole thing is a big pasta factory of interpreted code instead of a single static library). But at &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/markdown-replace-latex\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Markdown isn&#8217;t good enough to replace LaTeX&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dev","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1343"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1368,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343\/revisions\/1368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}