Re: Depreciating TeX-style LaTeX fragments

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Colin Baxter 😺 <m43cap@yandex.com> writes:

>>>>>> Sébastien Miquel <sebastien.miquel@posteo.eu> writes:
>
>     > Hi, With respect to readability, I only mean to point out that the
>     > $…$ syntax is one less character, and that the \(\) characters are
>     > quite overloaded.
>
> Indeed. Compare something like
>
> $g=\lim_{\delta m\to 0}(\delta F/\delta m)$
>
> with
>
> \(g=\lim_{\delta m\to 0}(\delta F/\delta m)\)
>
> Backslash city! I know which one I'd prefer to read.
>
>     >> this is a good opportunity to point out that $/$$ are very much
>     >> second class citizens in LaTeX now, no matter what you may see in
>     >> old documents.
>
>     > The posts that you quote are 10 years old. As per [0] (2020),
>     > there will be no LaTeX3. Nor is it only old documents that use the
>     > $…$ syntax : looking for learning ressources (see [1]), everything
>     > that I find uses it. That includes The Not So Short Introduction
>     > to LaTeX [2] (2021) and
>     > https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics.
>
> Ah, LaTeX3 - whatever happened to that?
>
>     > Although I have no evidence of this, my expectation is that the
>     > majority of tex users use the $…$ syntax (it is in fact widely
>     > used outside of tex: in most markdown flavors and texmacs for
>     > example). I also expect that a significant proportion of tex users
>     > are not aware of the \(…\) syntax. I think here of users that are
>     > less tech literate than most of this mailing list.
>
> Agreed.
>
> Best wishes,

While I can see the advantages of $..$ for equations, I think we also
need to keep in mind that org mode is NOT a latex or tex editing mode.
While it is excellent at providing a higher level abstraction which
works well with Latex, other considerations also need to come into play,
especially with respect to efficient and consistent parsing of org mode
syntax. From that perspective, $...$ seem to add complexity which is
making it much harder to get consistency and efficiency in parsing and
processing things like font locking, indentation etc.

The question then becomes "Is the slight reduction in typing and/or
possibly more readable $..$ syntax sufficient justification for more
complex and difficult to maintain code for parsing, font-locking and
indentation/filling? Furthermore, could not the readability issue be
even further enhanced with the \[...\] syntax if we are able to parse
the contents more reliably/efficiently and possibly provide other
mechanisms to improve readability of math/formula? (i.e. better
font-locking, hiding of delimiters etc).

I'm not convinced arguments regarding what authors familiar with writing
in Tex/Latex are familiar with is terribly relevant to org mode. There
are already things in org mode which are inconsistent with what you
would write in pure Tex/Latex and as mentioned, org mode is not just a
front-end for writing Tex/Latex documents. Org has its own flavoured
markup and we should work towards making the syntax of that markup as
consistent, clean and verifiable as possible.