[Python-markdown-discuss] Mathematics?

Hi!

In my (now dormant, and possibly moribund ;) project Atox [1], I had  
plans to add a filter using Tralics [2], effectively allowing an  
arbitrary mix of plain-text markup, XML and TeX/LaTeX. After some  
reflection, I've found that this (although doable) is probably  
overkill...

Now, in Markdown, I still have support for plain-text markup and XML  
(that is, XHTML), and I don't really need the full TeX handling of  
Tralics -- but it would be nice to have support for basic math.

So, I was thinking, perhaps a simple post- (or pre-?) processor  
extension, using dollar signs as inline tags (as in TeX) to mark  
math, and then either ship things out to a true TeX (as in the  
Wikimedia solution), to Tralics, or simply implement a basic LaTeX-to- 
MathML-translator.

I've been thinking about re-implementing the iTeX processor [3], for  
example, which isn't very complicated, but which covers quite a bit  
of math. (One could simply use MathML directly in Markdown, of  
course, but it would be quite a bit more verbose...) There are other  
solutions as well, of course [E.g., 4]. For rendering, there are even  
solutions for browsers that don't support MathML (although that  
doesn't have much to do with Markdown, I guess). [5]

[1] http://atox.sf.net
[2] http://www-sop.inria.fr/miaou/tralics
[3] http://pear.math.pitt.edu/mathzilla/itex2mml.html
[4] http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html
[5] http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath

--
Magnus Lie Hetland
http://hetland.org