Hi Sebastien,
Thanks for your comments, and your thoughts on the proposed deprecation.
It’s worth explicitly considering why we wouldn’t want to steer people away from the TeX-syntax LaTeX fragments, so I am glad you have brought up some reasons. I do not find myself agreeing with them however, and will endeavour to explain why below.
- It is easier to use
- Hmm. Not sure about this. Keystroke wise we’re comparing $$ to \(. The latter can be completed by smartparens, but since single dollars are reasonable Org content the former can’t. At this point the only argument is muscle memory, and if you’re a LaTeX user (a good target audience for LaTeX fragments I think), I’d expect LaTeX-style \( to be more familiar.
- Easier to read
- I had a quick look at a document to gauge this for myself, and if anything I
found the opposite (see
). This may be influenced by
a minor fontification tweak I made to LaTeX style input though.
- I had a quick look at a document to gauge this for myself, and if anything I
found the opposite (see
- more commonly used (and known) in tex documents (a quick web search for sample tex documents confirms the latter).
- Removing this syntax would make org slightly harder to pick up, with respect
to writing scientific documents.
- With respect to writing scientific documents, I think we can reasonably expect people to be familiar with \(, particularly given the points I raise below.
These points seem to have a common thread in wanting to have Org be like LaTeX. I find this sensible, but I think this is a good opportunity to point out that $/$$ are very much second class citizens in LaTeX now, no matter what you may see in old documents.
To quote from David Carlisle (one of the main members of the LaTeX3 team) on tex.stackexchange:
$$ is TeX primitive syntax, which, as others have commented is hard to redefine (in classic TeX there is no command name which triggers entering or leaving display math). LaTeX doesn’t officially support $$. The most noticeable failure if you use the syntax is that the fleqn option will no longer affect the display of the mathematics, it will remain centered rather than being set flush left.
Another member of the LaTeX3 team, Joseph Wright, has made even stronger comments about $-syntax on tex.stackexchange:
I’d note with my ’LaTeX3’ hat on that there is a strong chance we’ll favour \( ... \) to the point of not supporting $...$ for LaTeX3. So in the long term it might be best to get used to \(...\).
In further comments Joseph goes on to say that it is likely that $-syntax will not be dropped outright, but that $$ likely will be. Among other things the $-syntax produces worse error reporting and spacing.
So, to sum up LaTeX currently prefers \(...\) / \[...\] over $ / $$, and it looks like people will be pushed more strongly in this direction in future.
More than anything else, I think this demonstrates why aside from annoyances with the parsing, purely from a user perspective, it would make sense to favour LaTeX-syntax LaTeX fragments.
All the best,
Timothy