cben

mathdown

CoffeeScript2013–2018

cben / mathdown

mathdown

Collaborative markdown with math

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3Distinct people

7Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

419GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Collaborative markdown with math

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

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Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-10-14 21:46:44 UTC to 2018-09-11 09:00:13 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2013	2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2014	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

7 sources

astigsen·Sep 11, 2018

There is a very comprehensive overview of math support in the different flavors of Markdown here: https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown

In Ask HN: Is there something more convenient than LaTeX to write math (Markdown?)

cben·May 6, 2017

I wonder: did you spend much of this time on math formulas, or on "regular" typography like lists & headings? TeX math notation is the pretty much only game in town, and worth learning, but there are many ways to skip/ease the rest, might help your learning curve: - WYSIWYG with TeX math: Dropbox paper lets you press $$, type formula, press Enter; and I shudder to suggest it but I hear modern Word more or lets you type TeX math [https://superuser.com/a/509805/33415]. - WYSIWYM: Lyx, https://www.fiduswriter.org/, http://www.texts.io/ - Markdown with TeX math: there is alas no single standard syntax but tons of tools do support it: https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown For conversion Pandoc is king, infinitely flexible, and can render through LaTeX, HTML or many other ways. * Markdown is unbtrusive enough that styling it

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in-place gives you a form of WYSIWYG. Several editors doing this (plus rendering formulas in-place): StackEdit, Typora, https://www.gitbook.com/editor, Atom with https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline (see also https://discuss.atom.io/t/19222), http://markdownnotes.com/, and my own https://mathdown.net - https://overleaf.com similarly has "rich text mode" that styles LaTeX source and renders formulas in-place. [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81] - Other lightweights markups: there are too many, notably reStructuredText, asciidoc are popular and powerful. But I'd start with Markdown. I'm genuinely interested to hear your experiences if you try any of these...

In First introduction to LaTeX

brianjking·Feb 12, 2016

Also, you may want to check out https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown

In Ask HN: Best way to render latex equations in GitHub readme?

cben·Jan 13, 2016

Yep. For notes there is little justification for the full complexity of LaTeX, the most one needs is islands of LaTeX math. And you don't even need TeX installed — html with mathjax/katex is more flexible most of the time (but Pandoc will easily convert to latex/beamer when you need them). I'm cataloguing math support in markdown tools at https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown (help welcome). If you don't know where to start, the first to check out are probably StackEdit, Atom + https://discuss.atom.io/t/using-atom-for-academic-writing/19.... I have a theory that a single pane styled in-place is nicer for quick writing than 2 source+preview pane. Typora, Texts.io, and my own https://mathdown.net do that. If you do want full latex, try Overleaf.com, which has "rich text" mode where many constructs (sections, lists, math

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) are styled in-place (you could even hide the PDF pane).

In Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

cben·Nov 1, 2015

There are some sweet extensions for Atom + pandoc, notably https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline and https://atom.io/packages/markdown-preview-plus (convert with pandoc, fast & smooth preview update via DOM diffing/patching). See https://discuss.atom.io/t/using-atom-for-academic-writing/19... for more goodies. With non-Atom (e.g. Vim), https://github.com/yyjhao/markmon does fast DOM-diffing preview (I think it inspired markdown-preview-plus). Different direction: instead of multimedia inside markdown, consider something that mixes markdown, multimedia and other fragments. I'm specifically thinking IPython or Sage notebook. Not sure it's a win in itself but there are many other benefits for research notes... Finally, for those comfortable with latex writing, Overleaf in rich text mode is a quite good middle road — not markdown but less

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noise than raw latex: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81-having-a-hard-time-convinci... (overleaf also has git access for offline) For math in markdown, https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown lists all tools I'm aware off. --- > I don't need embedded multimedia, but I rather use a lot of Unicode characters for mathematics. Do you mean you use unicode as poor man's math support, or that you do render via pandoc/mathjax/etc but prefer to have $β^2$ rather than $\beta^2$ in the source? I'm curious, does in-place whole-formula rendering solve your need or do you actually care about unicode symbols in source? And how would you ideally want to type them? "\be" offering autocompletion to β? http://kasperpeulen.github.io/PressAndHold/ ?

In Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

cben·Nov 1, 2015

I'm also a believer in in-place formatting rather than 2-pane. Ever since i saw it in [Qute][] (no longer developed), and emacs auctex preview-mode (TiddlyWiki also deserves some credit). Editorially did this well and was well-recieved but for some reason people are not really filling the void. I'm especially surprised it's not more popular on mobile where 2 panes waste real estate and whole-screen toggling is jarring. The only mobile editor with in-place formatting I know is Writer & [Writer Plus][]. [Qute]: http://www.inkcode.net/qute [Writer Plus]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.easy4u.writ... Also, --- I'm working on https://mathdown.net [https://github.com/cben/mathdown] which does in-place formatting. It's comparable to Stackedit or Classeur in that it's simply "syntax highlighting", e.g. headings are big and em

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phasis is italic. - The formatting chars (#, * etc) are still visible, just a bit de-emphasized. I know many people prefer them to disappear except near the cursor. That's trickier to implement with good UX, and not planned soon (PRs welcome of course). - There is no inline image preview (yet). Nor tables, diagrams, embedded videos... Even links are not (yet) clickable. + There is nice in-place LaTeX math rendering (slighly buggy but very usable). This is my biggest unique feature [https://github.com/cben/CodeMirror-MathJax]. Comparable to Overleaf.com's "rich text" mode. + I'm doing "soft indent" [https://www.mathdown.net/?doc=demo-indentwrap]. This is a really low-hanging way to make one-long-line-per-paragraph usable, which IMHO is essential for in-place styling. + Leading indentation (and list bullets/numbers/quotation) is monospaced to help align stuff. If anybody's building their own, I'm using and strongly recommend CodeMirror. It makes mixed fonts - things like bigger headings - really trivial and supports arbitrary embedded "widgets". @benweet pulled off polished in-place formatting in StackEdit (and on top of contenteditable but that's way harder...

In Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

cben·Oct 14, 2013

I'm working on http://mathdown.net (https://github.com/cben/mathdown). Open, except for using Firebase. Very much alpha at this stage - unsecure, sub-par highlighting, doesn't help with formatting, slow math rendering, if you don't bookmark all your documents you lose them... I'm not hiding markup like Mango, except for latex formulas which I'm replacing with mathjax rendering - but they turn back into source the moment the cursor enters them. It's inspired by emacs' auctex and more directly by https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jamesmc.wr... (gratis but closed). I'm also surprised almost nobody is taking the syntax-highlight-IS-the-preview approach to markdown editing. I've heard the "plain markdown lets me focus on content and ignore formatting" idea, but I don't see how e.g. bigger font for headings is undesirable. It's

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not that variable fonts are hard to implement - CodeMirror already solved this: http://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html (Variable fonts are not a pure win. They screw up indentation => I'm planning to use monospace for all leading spaces, as well as list bullets/numbers.)

In StackEdit: A free, open-source Markdown editor based on PageDown