
Add Math and LaTeX to Your GitHub Readme.md - leegao
https://github.com/leegao/readme2tex
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chmaynard
Am I missing something? I have never seen a GitHub project with math notation
in the README, and I can't think of a case where that would be useful. The
more general problem of adding math notation to markdown is worth considering.
It's painful to read blog posts that include a lot of math (for example,
anything written by John Baez).

~~~
leegao
There are already several extensions to markdown with LaTeX support. For
example, StackExchange supports flavored markdown with a Mathjax backend, as
do most static Markdown renderers out there. Nevertheless, since Markdown
isn't standardized across the field, we really can't complain that some
support LaTeX while others do not. Since it gets asked about in
/github/markdown often enough however, I believe that it's worth some
consideration.

I think the answer to your question is more situational. For example, the ML
community routinely publish supplementary material on Github. While the
introductory section of these repositories should be accessible to everyone,
they do also go fairly deep with technicals before referencing their
respective publication for more details. The PL community also routinely use
Github as a distribution platform. For them, it's often much more compact to
give the semantics of their language-extension as a system of equations rather
than as words. This doesn't absolve them of the obligation of giving readable
examples of the specification, but for some of these more technical
repositories, it's a nice-to-have as well.

Having said all of this, the ML community has thought up of a rather clever
workaround for this already. Github renders ipynb notebooks that has LaTeX in
side of its Markdown sections, so many READMEs just reference a Jupyter
notebook. This is just a different approach on that problem.

~~~
chmaynard
Thanks for taking time to respond with your insights. Rendering math notation
for screen display in an HTML browser is a difficult and challenging problem.

For a long time, TeX was the best-of-class document rendering software for
mathematics. I believe TeX emits Postscript, which works wonderfully for
printed articles and books. Web developers can either try to leverage legacy
software like TeX or take an entirely different approach. Can you point to a
good summary article on this topic?

