jake-low

ProseMirror (a JavaScript library for building rich text editors) also employs a document model like this. The docs for that project [2] do a good job of explaining how their implementation of this idea works, and what problems it solves.

Personally I like being able to type math symbols on occasion but don't do so often enough to benefit from a custom keyboard layout that I'd then have to memorize. I didn't have a good way to do this until about a year ago, when I learned about Espanso [1] which is a cross-platform text expander. I installed it and set it up to substitute various (vaguely LaTeX-inspired) macros to UTF-8 strings. For example, typing the following keystrokes

    x = R cos(:phi) sin(:lambda :minus :lambda:nought)

I chose ':' as a prefix for all my macros but this is just a self-enforced convention; you can configure a substitution for any sequence of keystrokes. Since I gave all the characters names that made sense to me, I don't have to think much when I type them.

A few of the substitutions I get the most mileage out of:

- The Greek alphabet, both upper and lowercase (:theta → θ and :Omega → Ω)

- Double-struck letters for numerical sets; e.g. :RR → ℝ

- :infinity → ∞

- :neq → ≠

- :pm → ±

ZIP/postal codes are generally smaller (in the county I live in there are almost a hundred ZIP codes). I'm not sure they're even guaranteed to be entirely within one county either. We tend to think of ZIP codes as boundaries but they're actually delivery routes (which if you squint can be converted into boundaries by joining the properties that those routes serve together).

I've heard of AsciiMath before but hadn't ever had a chance to play with it, so I appreciated the live demo on the project website. One thing I noticed is that AsciiMath uses whitespace around operators to determine binding order.

For example (AsciiMath on left, TeX on right)

    f(x) = x+1 / 2    ≡    f(x) = \frac{x + 1}{2}
    f(x) = x + 1/2    ≡    f(x) = x + \frac{1}{2}

This seems fairly intuitive, but might not scale to large, complex equations as well as TeX's bracket syntax does. Nonetheless, I think I like it for simple equations.

Question for the author: you mention on the page that Mathup supports an input language inspired by AsciiMath [2]. What are the differences? Does Mathup accept a subset of AsciiMath, or are there cases where the syntax diverges? And if the latter is the case, what motivated devaiting from AsciiMath's syntax?

Giving opinionated styles to unclassed HTML elements is definitely not the right fit for every website. But, given this project's goal of being a minimalist, quick-start stylesheet that requires no classes, I think this use of `a em` and `a strong` selectors to create button-y links is pretty ingenious.

I was frustrated that the DOH data and SeattleTimes maps only showed the current point in time, which made it difficult to answer the question "is social distancing working?". So I scraped previous days' published tables from the Internet Archive, set up a script to scrape new data from the DOH website as soon as it's published, and built a visualization that lets you scrub back and forth along the timeline to see the extent of the outbreak.

Code is available in the page (it's an Observable notebook) and data is available on GitHub [0]. Let me know if you're interested in using the data and I'll be happy to help you get started; there are other data tables in the archived HTML pages that I haven't scraped and converted to CSV yet, but in theory they too could be extracted and visualized.