2022-06-11 | #XKCD
@dj-chase had piece about a super clever way to display complex math formulas in plain gemtext: Using preformatted text!
DJ Chase's post on Math in preformatted text
This is a great solution for people who are writing their own gemtext and wanting to include math. However it requires a fair amount of manual work to make it look right, and a good know of the unicode characters you have available. Unfortunately for me, I'm dealing with arbitrary math formulas Wikipedia content. I think it would be really difficult to write code that could do this conversion automatically.
Luckily for me, most of these math formaula's a defined using LaTeX, which is exactly made for this, and Wikipedia gets me access to PNG with beautifully rendered LaTeX
Math Formula from the "Uncertainty principle" article
Gemipedia: "Uncertainty principle"
... ... you know...
I do have the LaTeX code...
... and while some formulas are pretty complex, many of them aren't, like the area of a triangle. I wonder if someone has thought of a way to turn LaTeX into a Unicode string just using native unicode symbols...
It turns out, people have:
This code is pretty similar to how I handled subscripts and superscripts. It supports some fractions, superscripts, subscripts, and symbols like Δ. I should be able to adopt this code into something that tries to convert LaTeX to Unicode, and know if I was able to fully convert all parts of the formula:
So now I'm thinking: