nschloe

I've compiled a neat little comparison on what math in Markdown can and can't do on different platforms. TLDR: Don't use GitHub if you're serious.

An interesting take, thanks for the input! As a layman (pretty much), I had always a bit frowned upon reST since I never got used to syntax. That was probably because Markdown was already so popular when I started using it.

One little remark: You can still have highlighted math code blocks in gh's Markdown. The lang here is ```latex. Anyway, I see this might not be satisfactory.

This is great news! It's not working for me quite yet, but I'm refreshing my browser every 5 minutes. Next stop: Proper inline math.

The big advantage of using code blocks is that is guarantees that their sanitizer doesn't mess with the contents. This is a pretty big plus.

Also, you can of course still have mermaid code blocks; just don't put `mermaid` after the three backticks. The code block won't have any syntax highlighting, but in the case of `math`, this wouldn't make sense anyway.

I agree: If you're choosing dollar signs for your math delimiters, you can't expect them to work as regular dollar signs anymore; just like backticks.

> sounds like the parsing operations are done in the wrong order.

Indeed!

> I've used jupyter-book to typeset math-in-markdown before now,

They're using $-math as well?

Probably pandoc protects whatever is inside $...$ or $$...$$. GitHub doesn't. I would be curious to know how pandoc handles the other failing cases.

Well, it _is_ (La)TeX syntax. With the exception that there, if you want a dollar sign, you have to type \$. But yeah, the syntax isn't made for Markdown.

In May, GitHub added native math support. Unfortunately, it left lots to be desired. Six weeks later, I'm taking another look. Have the major issues been fixed? (Spoiler: No.)

Author here. Thanks for the comment!

The main problems pointed out in the blog post are problems in _parsing_ the Markdown+TeX pages. The output could be MathML indeed, but this is an issue they could always fix later.

Author here.

That is interesting! Have you tried it on the examples in the blog post? I'd be curious to see.

Author here.

I've been a managing editor for scientific journals for a number of years, and I can tell that -- while $ is still popular -- (almost) nobody uses $$ anymore. So I wouldn't say this is "where people already are".

The difference between GitHub and pandoc with GitHub-flavored Markdown as input is that pandoc doesn't sanitize as aggressively as GitHub does. For example, pandoc doesn't remove the backslash-escapes before non-letters as in `\{`.

Not sure if GitHub will compromise here, though.