Re: wikipedia's (ascii) math notation? emacs easy-way to translate it?

[Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>]

On Dec 1, 6:08 am, David Hansen <david.han...@gmx.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:31:23 +0100 Sven Utcke wrote:
>
> > dkco...@panix.com (David Combs) writes:
>
> >> I see this stuff in math articles in wikipedia -- uses some kind
> >> of ascii math-notation.  What is it?
>
> It's called TeX.  Probably the best type setting software out there.

that's one of the myth among open source tech geekers.

TeX is proprobably not among one of the best tool among typesetting
professionals.

When tech geekers speak of TeX, they often speak of in the domain of
mathematical knowledge presentation and publishing. In the math
knowledge presentation, i am a expert, and personally known that
Mathematica is a ORDER OF MAGNITUDE better than TeX. Mathematica is a
order of magnitude better because its typesetting system not only
passively show math formulas as a pretty printing system, but the
markup syntax is also semantically meaningful. (for example, when you
type set x^2/x^3, it actually knows that it is x^(2/3) and you can
have it automatically simplify the expression or computer numerical
values). Having a math typesetting system that also has semantic
meaning is part of the expressed goal of MathML (which started after
Mathematica had such a system is heavily influened by Wolfram
Research). However, so far MathML never caught up.

See:

• The TeX Pestilence
  http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html

In the domain of publishing, there's Framemaker and QuarkXPress, long
been the top professional tool since early 1990s. (i haven't used them
though) I do not know whether TeX has even have a good percentage of
market share among professionals typesetters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framemaker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄