2008/10/17 Andrew Coppin
It strikes me that perhaps using LaTeX to enter mathematical markup is rather against the spirit of Markdown. Surely there should be an option to include raw LaTeX, but a more "natural" encoding that covers "most" mathematics would be nice also. Of course, that means somebody has to design it first...
Here's something along those lines, which I found recently on the W3C MathML software page: http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/asciimath.html It's a converter from an ASCII syntax to Presentation MathML, written in JavaScript to allow mathematical notation on web pages to be converted to MathML in browsers that support it, or kept as ASCII in browsers that don't. There's a specification of the ASCII syntax which would be a good starting point if you want to write another implementation: http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimathsyntax.html Presumably this can't express everything that MathML can (and it doesn't deal with Content MathML), so it would be useful to support MathML in the source, like Markdown allows inline HTML, or LaTeX. Andy