Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

unicode.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 59 posts

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#21

Post by Jtsummers »

grenoire wrote: post #19
knolan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can on a Mac. Holding the option key allows typing a whole host of symbols. https://beebom.com/how-type-hidden-mac-keyboard-symbols/

This is like asking someone to use Alt codes ( https://www.alt-codes.net/ ) on Windows, it's highly unintuitive and cumbersome.

They aren’t terribly intuitive, but they are much easier than alt-codes. If you’re a touch typist it doesn’t take long to memorize a reasonable number of symbol positions. I still can’t temember any alt-codes though when I’m on a windows machine.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#22

Post by userbinator »

I thought the format of the document looked familiar... and then saw "Microsoft Corporation". I've seen a lot of other documents from them with the same formatting, and it always feels a bit weird to me --- something looks a bit off about the (body) font.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#23

Post by ygra »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #7

What I would like is a set of characters and a font that I could use to enter immediately readable math formulae into my text editor, so that I can take quick notes at a conference, or whenever. I can already do it, to some extent, for instance, this is the summation equation from page 5 in the pdf above: ₙ ⎛n⎞ (a + b)ⁿ = ∑ ⎜ ⎟ aᵏbⁿ⁻ᵏ ᵏ⁼⁰ ⎝k⎠ But, the scale is off (the summation is too small) and the characters are a…

> They're all markups, so they all require at least some mental rendering.

Unicode maintains the position that plain text is unsuitable for this sort of thing and markup languages are preferred. That's also why there are no "formatting" modifiers except in cases where the result actually has different semantics that are important to distinguish (cf. RTL and LTR override). Overall I'd say Unicode does a fairly good job keeping too weirdness out of the standard. Emoji are obviously a much-contended addition, albeit one that already had a history of existence and widespread use in plain-text. And while you find all symbols needed for math rendering in Unicode, some of the weirder ones sometimes came from older character encodings and their existence does not mean that full math markup should be part of Unicode.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#24

Post by ygra »

userbinator wrote: post #22

I thought the format of the document looked familiar... and then saw "Microsoft Corporation". I've seen a lot of other documents from them with the same formatting, and it always feels a bit weird to me --- something looks a bit off about the (body) font.

Cambria. Personally I don't like it much, although I don't hate it as much as Computer Modern or Times. The main reason here is most likely that Cambria is also Microsoft's primary math typeface and having the body text and math use the same typeface is IMHO preferable.

Constantia pairs fairly well with Cambria as well, though.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#25

Post by rijoja »

Shameless plug I am working on something related. System with nice keybindings which feels sort of allright after 5-10 minutes.

The idea is to combine an efficient onscreen structure with key presses typed by the left hand. So press q,w,e, etcetera to select.

Currently I'm looking at MathML and Tex support, would anyone who uses Math daily be interested in UTF-8 support?

My instinct tells me that this UTF solution seems like a nightmare.

https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/richard-ja...

https://github.com/richard-jansson/roosevelt/

It's possible to input into the os, leave a comment of you're interested.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#26

Post by enriquto »

guipsp wrote: post #16
enriquto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess... LaTeX is beautiful and powerful, but mixed with unicode (in the right doses) it becomes astonishingly more powerful. For example, you can keep the block constructors {} _ and ^, but use unicode symbols such as α, ∂, ∫, instead of \alpha, \partial, \int

But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard.

> But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard.

I have a standard keyboard and I type greek letters easily. ALTGR+a, and so on.

If somebody is not able to configure their keyboard to do this they are not probably writing LaTeX, either.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#27

Post by enriquto »

dagw wrote: post #13
enriquto wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> living in the world of mostly ascii-limited code this looks exotic this is is not the world where everybody lives. I live mostly in the world of math books, where all variables are single letters (which is the main difference here, and not the use of unicode). I tend to find code written by non-mathematicians ridiculous and unreadable. Instead of E = m * c^2 they seem to prefer bullshit like thing->Energy = thing->…

> E = m * c^2 The problem then occurs when you work in a multidisciplinary group and 'everybody' wants to use 'p' or 'c' or whatever mean the the super obvious thing it means in their field and you have to remember what each letter means in 6 different fields and the 'p' in function f means something completely different from the 'p' in function g.

> the 'p' in function f means something completely different from the 'p' in function g.

And that's OK. The 'x' in mathematics means completely different things depending on the equation. That's what comments are for, to explain the meaning of the local variables on each function.

    // E: energy of the thing
    // m: mass of the thing
    // c: constant representing the speed of light in vacuum
    E = m * c^2
I cannot read multiple-letter variables without unconsciously interpreting them as the product of several single-letter variables. It requires a lot of conscious effort that obscures my understanding of the code.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#28

Post by zimpenfish »

enriquto wrote: post #26
guipsp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard.

> But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard. I have a standard keyboard and I type greek letters easily. ALTGR+a, and so on. If somebody is not able to configure their keyboard to do this they are not probably writing LaTeX, either.

If memory serves me correctly, there was no way to type those symbols on an Acorn A5000 which is where I did the bulk of my LaTeXing back in the day (1992-95).

(Admittedly, this anecdata is even more useless than usual.)

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#29

Post by ygra »

rijoja wrote: post #25

Shameless plug I am working on something related. System with nice keybindings which feels sort of allright after 5-10 minutes. The idea is to combine an efficient onscreen structure with key presses typed by the left hand. So press q,w,e, etcetera to select. Currently I'm looking at MathML and Tex support, would anyone who uses Math daily be interested in UTF-8 support? My instinct tells me that this UTF solution se…

If this is merely an input method then MathML is pretty much all you probably need as it can be pasted into or consumed by most applications handling math, including Word. Plus TeX for, well, TeX.

This format is mostly geared towards input as well, in that you have defined automatic replacements as well as a format that can be typed easily and be built up to rendered math during typing. If you have your own completely different input method you wouldn't gain much from this.

Re: UnicodeMath – A Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics (2016) [pdf]

#30

Post by joppy »

guipsp wrote: post #16
enriquto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess... LaTeX is beautiful and powerful, but mixed with unicode (in the right doses) it becomes astonishingly more powerful. For example, you can keep the block constructors {} _ and ^, but use unicode symbols such as α, ∂, ∫, instead of \alpha, \partial, \int

But you can't type α, ∂, or ∫ in a standard keyboard.

I feel like this is the sweet spot for the editor to do some of the heavy lifting, for example being able to type "\alpha" and have the editor automatically transform it into the symbol α. I write a lot of LaTeX, and I would absolutely love an editor which could just transparently deal with all of the underlying mathematics markup so I would never have to see it again, and just directly edit the damn equations. Serialising and unserialising mathematics markup mentally is basically the antithesis of mathematical notation.
Post reply on HN