All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...
For me, I'm able to use both LaTeX and this, but the main points that make this more convenient to me is that it relies less on characters that are present in awkward locations in many keyboard layouts (such as {}) and the equivalent formula is often much shorter due to somewhat more advanced tokenizing (of course, specific to math input, as the format doesn't have the same constraints as a general-purpose programming and markup language), e.g. x^12 works for x to the power of 12 instead of resulting in x^1 2.
LaTeX is beautiful and powerful, but mixed with unicode (in the right doses) it becomes astonishingly more powerful. For example, you can keep the block constructors {} _ and ^, but use unicode symbols such as α, ∂, ∫, instead of \alpha, \partial, \int
I can already do it, to some extent, for instance, this is the summation equation from page 5 in the pdf above:
ₙ ⎛n⎞
(a + b)ⁿ = ∑ ⎜ ⎟ aᵏbⁿ⁻ᵏ
ᵏ⁼⁰ ⎝k⎠
Worse, there is basically only one free monospaced font that will display all of those characters (DejaVu Sans Mono) and even that doesn't cover all the symbols I might want to use. For instance, I use the "entails" symbol a lot and that renders as a ⊨ in DejaVu Sans Mono, so I have to put it togehter with what I got: |= or \= for the negative.
Each of the methods discussed in the pdf above (as far as I've read in it, which is not too far) are far from ideal. They're all markups, so they all require at least some mental rendering. Why can't I have a script that lets me write each special symbol as one character, or at worse, a few of them like for the large parens, above?
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Edit: And you'll need to set your broswer's font to a monospaced font to see the equation above properly :/
Unicode maintains the position that plain text is unsuitable for this sort of thing and markup languages are preferred. That's also why there are no "formatting" modifiers except in cases where the result actually has different semantics that are important to distinguish (cf. RTL and LTR override). Overall I'd say Unicode does a fairly good job keeping too weirdness out of the standard. Emoji are obviously a much-contended addition, albeit one that already had a history of existence and widespread use in plain-text. And while you find all symbols needed for math rendering in Unicode, some of the weirder ones sometimes came from older character encodings and their existence does not mean that full math markup should be part of Unicode.
Well, I think that's an unreasonable position. The most intuitive way to enter mathematical text with a keyboard is to enter the symbols you want to enter, directly, as characters. I mean, nobody asks me, as a Greek speaker, to enter (hypothetical markup) \{greek_letter_xi} for χ or \{greek_letter_ypsilon} for υ, etc, thank the gods. Why do I have to use markup for the simplest things, like fractions and exponentials?
All symbols for math may be in Unicode, but there is no font supporting all of them. It's not Unicode that's at fault here, of course.
The idea is to combine an efficient onscreen structure with key presses typed by the left hand. So press q,w,e, etcetera to select.
Currently I'm looking at MathML and Tex support, would anyone who uses Math daily be interested in UTF-8 support?
My instinct tells me that this UTF solution seems like a nightmare.
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/richard-ja...
https://github.com/richard-jansson/roosevelt/
It's possible to input into the os, leave a comment of you're interested.
This format is mostly geared towards input as well, in that you have defined automatic replacements as well as a format that can be typed easily and be built up to rendered math during typing. If you have your own completely different input method you wouldn't gain much from this.
Constantia pairs fairly well with Cambria as well, though.
What (latex compatible) fonts do you like/recommend then?
In my opinion, it's kind of sad to see how strongly Computer Modern dominates the font choices in latex (and more generally the latex monoculture).
(Full disclosure: it's my thread)