Jan Hidders wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>(Contrary to popular opinion, I've never
suggested $$x \le y$$.
Sorry for that, I started that rumour, it seemed like a
logical
generalization of your idea and as such not a bad suggestion.
>What I suggested was $$x$$ ≤ $$y$$, which
won't fool any TeXer
>into thinking that it's actual TeX; the markup is merely *inspired* by TeX.
I would not be so sure: $$ *is* LaTeX mark-up.
Hence the inspiration. But ≤ is not, much less outside of math mode.
One of the first things that a new TeXer learns is that
the fastest way to an error is writing something like $x$ \le $y$.
Of course, you're a TeXer too, so I should listen if you disagree,
but *I* don't see how anybody will be fooled.
>The only thing that $$...$$ has over [[math:...]]
is in the situation of a
>very short formula like a single letter, and there it's better to use
><var> instead of a gif *anyway*.
I disagree strongly. That would mean that if I have a
formula with one
letter variables and two letter variables the first would be written as
<var> and the second as TeX within the same text. Always using LaTeX will
look better and is more consistent.
I don't see why we should expect somebody to have a graphical interface
to read "Suppose that $$x$$ is a [[real number]]. Then ...".
That's reasonable for "If $$\int_a^b f(x)\,dx$$ exists, ...",
which is legible to hardly anybody except as a picture,
but the first will be mighty annoying to read if a voice reader
describes it as "image labelled "x"" or something.
There's another reason for having a simple method producing <var>
and a complicated method producing a PNG by calling LaTeX.
LaTeX is hardly more easy for a technophobe to learn than HTML,
and we don't want them to think that they can't edit a math expression
without learning LaTeX. Tell them that [[math:]] is this huge PITA
(which can't be avoided with an integral) but that $$ is easy as pie.
-- Toby Bartels
<toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu>