[YeGoblynQueenne]

What I'd really like to see is a font that has lots of sub- and super-scripts and other mathy symbols, like: ⎛⎜⎝⎞⎟⎠⎡⎢⎣⎤⎥⎦⎧⎩⎪⎫⎬⎭⎮ so that I can keep my class notes in text files.

So far the only font I found that supports a lot of that sort of thing is DejaVu Sans mono but even that is rather sparse- there's very few Greek letter super/subscripts say, and there's a limited selection of Latin superscripts. Block elements and box drawings wouldn't hurt either.

[mietek]

PragmataPro. Here you go: http://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

[viley]

ReactOS has such a version of the VGA font, UniVGA16: https://github.com/mirror/reactos/blob/master/reactos/media/...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Hi folks, thanks for the suggestions.

I know about pragmata pro and unifont. I've tried Unifont, I think it hurt my eyes a bit but it sure has lots of glyphs. Pragmata is very pretty and has great coverage but it's not free and I don't see that it has more glyphs than free fonts, for instance with DejaVu mono I have a subscript for j which I don't see in Pragmata. Or, the APL glyphs for instance; unifont has them too and it's free.

I'll give ReactOS a try, thanks. I had given up hope to be honest, I guess Unicode is just too big to implement fully.

Edit: Ok, Pragmata costs €19 for just the regular weight- I thought it was costed by unicode range. I could definitely give that a try, so thanks for the hint mietek.

2nd Edit: Ouch, no- the mono font is €59. That's too high again :)

[teach]

Do you know TeX/LaTeX? If not, sounds like you should learn it.

It's all my mathy friends use for taking notes.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.

[Elv13]

Most implementations of markdown allow inline La/Tex and HTML, this is the best of both world. You have plain text notes and the power to inline some math.

I would also suggest iPython notebook (if you can live with web apps, I don't) as it allow you to see what you write in real time and add some code too (and being able to use mathplotlib). That being said, I used computer to take note in high school (The KDE3 version of basket notepad, the evernote of 2006, now defunct), but switched back to pen and paper for college, formatting was much easier ;)

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I'm thinking of giving markdown a try, for the reasons you say, but I'm not sure how the maths notation looks like when it's not rendered. I think it's all escaped characters, in which case it won't be as readable as plain text, even with rare glyphs that need special fonts.

Some text editors even let you enter rare characters with key combinations (frex, Vim's digraphs). The end result is pretty much WYSIWIG mathematical notation.

Here's an example from my machine learning class notes:

        ⎛ ₙ       ⎞

ƒ̂(x) = θ⎜ ∑ wᵢxᵢ ⎟

        ⎝ ⁱ⁼⁰     ⎠

So, that looks a mess on HN, but if you copy/paste it in a decent text editor, with a font that has all the necessary characters, you'll get a nice formula that you can keep around for as long as there's text editors supporting ASCII- and you don't have to rely on any special tools to render it properly.

That's what I'm going on about- but there's not enough super/subscripts in ASCII itself. :)

[teach]

I'm not sure you're using the term "ASCII" correctly. There are virtually no characters in ASCII that aren't printed on a key on a typical US keyboard.

Especially when you say "with a font that has all the necessary characters". ASCII is ASCII. All fonts (except Wingdings) have 100% of the ASCII characters.

Maybe you're pasting in Unicode; maybe you're using the Windows-only ALT-numeric keypad garbage.

But I suspect your "nice formula" that renders in a text editor maybe isn't as clean or standard as you think.

[bgar]

If you use Emacs' Org mode, you can actually convert parts of the buffer to LaTeX and have them inline. This solves the problem of equations being not as readable as you're writing.

[david-given]

unifont is pretty good. It's a bitmap font, so it's got that pixelly old-school look, but it's got complete Unicode basic plane support and at least some ('growing support', it says) astral plane support.

http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html