[red_admiral]

This sounds like a solved problem in theory, but someone has to fix the parser.

The commonmark spec defines left- and right-flanking delimiters, and provides a reference implementation that can get this right for backticks to represent inline code. Doing the same with dollar signs - and treating the content delimited by them, like the content delimited by backticks, as not to be processed further as markdown should handle most use cases.

Admittedly, the phrase "an apple costs $1 but an orange is 2$ for some reason" would be incorrectly recognised as math, but only because you're switching how you place the dollar signs halfway through.

Not recognising $[a+b](c+d)$ because the brackets are also link syntax sounds like the parsing operations are done in the wrong order. The $ comes first, so it should win.

I've used jupyter-book to typeset math-in-markdown before now, and it gets this just right, showing that it's a solved problem in practice too unless I'm missing something.

[nschloe]

I agree: If you're choosing dollar signs for your math delimiters, you can't expect them to work as regular dollar signs anymore; just like backticks.

> sounds like the parsing operations are done in the wrong order.

Indeed!

> I've used jupyter-book to typeset math-in-markdown before now,

They're using $-math as well?