[koito17]

> I don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the standard

I would argue that is exactly what LaTeX is... I studied mathematics in university, and from what I recall, every major publisher provided a LaTeX template for articles and textbooks. Likewise, pretty much every mathematics presentation uses Beamer slides, and most mathematicians are able to "compile" subsets of LaTeX in their head. Websites like MSE and MO use MathJax precisely so that people can write notation as they would on assignments, notes, papers, etc.

Note: I am not saying people particularly like LaTeX as a tool. However, the vast majority of the complaints about LaTeX do seem to be from computer science people. Many mathematics students just create an Overleaf (formerly ShareLaTeX) account and call it a day. Of course, nobody enjoys notes taking 10 seconds to compile, or the first 100 lines of their thesis being a preamble, but the important part is the ability to express notation across a variety of mediums, and the publisher support (as GP mentioned).

[didericis]

I agree the standard for mathematical notation is latex, but it’s only needed for fairly limited parts of a document. It makes more sense to me as something you’d use in snippets like `$\sum_{n=1}^{10}n$` than something that should control the whole document.

Markdown and mathjax is imo way more web friendly than a full latex document and avoids distracting/unnecessary aspects of latex.

As for publisher support, that’s what frustrates me most: html was specifically designed for academics at cern to publish and link documents. Instead of using an html friendly format like markdown, publishers demand a format designed for printing content to a physical piece of paper. So now html is used for almost everything except academic papers, and academic papers are all pdfs submitted to journal or preprint severs with no links.