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

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

#4

Post by grenoire »

This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about it.

All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...

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

#5

Post by jcagalawan »

grenoire wrote: post #4

This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about it. All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...

It's the same one as implemented in MS Word (and PowerPoint, OneNote), this standard was written by an engineer who is on the Math in Office team and maintains a blog [1]. It's the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've used so far. LaTeX has its place, but it's hard to convince non-coders to use it and I'm glad it has the editor. I stumbled into this specification trying to format a constrained optimization problem and found the equation array format to be fairly straightforward similar to the bmatrix environment in LaTeX and thought it was neat that Unicode could represent so much math.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/

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

#6

Post by robinhouston »

grenoire wrote: post #4

This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about it. All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...

The author of this paper, Murray Sargent, has a blog at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/

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

#7

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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 mix of sub- and super-scripts and modifiers (in other cases, diacriticals), and multiple characters in the case of the long parentheses. I have to go hunting each of those characters down every time I want to use them, because I'm never sure exactly what characters are available. And even when I do, I still have to look them up most of the time, because of course I can't remember the unicode number for Modifier Letter Small k off the top of my head every time I need it (although by now I've learned the ones for super/subscript i and n by heart, mostly)

Worse, there is basically only one free monospaced font that will display all of those characters (DejaVu Sans Mono) and even that doesn't cover all the symbols I might want to use. For instance, I use the "entails" symbol a lot and that renders as a ⊨ in DejaVu Sans Mono, so I have to put it togehter with what I got: |= or \= for the negative.

Each of the methods discussed in the pdf above (as far as I've read in it, which is not too far) are far from ideal. They're all markups, so they all require at least some mental rendering. Why can't I have a script that lets me write each special symbol as one character, or at worse, a few of them like for the large parens, above?

____________________

Edit: And you'll need to set your broswer's font to a monospaced font to see the equation above properly :/

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

#8

Post by thrwia22 »

enriquto wrote: post #3
thrwia22 wrote: post #2

dat c++ function on page 36 tho.. omg

It is much more readable than the version using full-length words for variables.

i totally agree, but living in the world of mostly ascii-limited code this looks exotic, weird and refreshing. and cool

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

#9

Post by enriquto »

thrwia22 wrote: post #8
enriquto wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much more readable than the version using full-length words for variables.

i totally agree, but living in the world of mostly ascii-limited code this looks exotic, weird and refreshing. and cool

> 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->Mass() * np.math.pow(lib.constants.speedOfLightInVacuum,2)

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

#10

Post by enriquto »

grenoire wrote: post #4

This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about it. All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...

> 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

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