[sidupadhyay]

This is one best directions with the available technology. We're trying to do this at Hoot with what we call "Smart Chat." We've taken the markdown editor and adapted backticks (`) to wrap a simplified subset of Latex, so that the language is more accessible to a wider audience by providing immediate rendering and feedback. In our case the uses are much more simple than the troff example above (https://apps.facebook.com/hootapp/?sid=5Yyt797Jg), but are still very applicable. I think our most common use is by highschoolers and college students for calculus, where ideas such as integrals and summations are easily described in plain english:

`integral cos(x)*e^(2x) dx` or `sum (x^n) / (n!)`

edit: added simpler examples