Awesome, after being on here for 4 months I finally figured out how to write toots with markdown formatting:

Toots can be written in three source formats:

• Plain text: toots are treated like in vanilla Mastodon, and are not formatted
• Markdown: toots can be written in Markdown, as understood by Redcarpet
• HTML: toots are written directly in HTML (but sanitized to strip any unsupported formatting)

You can write toots in Markdown or HTML from the glitch flavour by first enabling “Show content-type choice when authoring toots” in the “Compose box” tab of the app settings.

I wonder how this is displayed on servers that do not run glitch-soc though...

Oh, it actually looks reasonable. Nice!

@agdakx on types we also have TeX but don't ask me what the delimiters are. they're in a quantum superposition of never being the ones you try, at least

@agdakx generally i force the wave function to collapse by asking ionchy

@amy @agdakx wait, are there other delimiters than \ ( and \ ) ?

@ahfrom @amy @agdakx \ [ \ ] gives you display mode on Mathstodon.

Sample:

We can use the fundamental theorem of calculus to say that
$$\int_2^3 x^2 \, dx=\frac{3^3}{3}-\frac{2^3}{3}=\frac{19}{3}$$.
Also note that $$\displaystyle \int_2^3 x^2 \, dx=\frac{3^3}{3}-\frac{2^3}{3}=\frac{19}{3}$$.
We can also give this equation its own line
$\int_2^3 x^2 \, dx=\frac{3^3}{3}-\frac{2^3}{3}=\frac{19}{3}.$

@Arpie4Math @amy @agdakx Thanks. My poor joke was that everyone hates on my preferred \ ( and \ ) so I wanted to throw some shade at $and$.

Would this work in mathstodon, though?

@MartinEscardo @agdakx I don't *think* Mastodon does anything like this. The Elk client has some formatting, but I'm not sure to what extent that's done on the client side. For example, the word “think” was in italics earlier, but might come out either surrounded by asterisks or unformatted.

@MartinEscardo @agdakx I suppose it's worth trying *italic via underscores*, too. Unfortunately, I'm sending this from a WYSIWYG rich text box.

@MartinEscardo @agdakx the plan is for the next version of mastodon to support displaying formatted text that comes from other fediverse software that can produce it.
The mastodon developers have been firmly of the opinion that they don't think mastodon should support posting formatted text, though.
(I think practically, once they've committed to displaying it, a lot of mastodon instances will fork to allow posting it too)

@christianp @MartinEscardo @agdakx Apparently the redcarpet devs hate MathJax (github.com/vmg/redcarpet/issue) and their markdown processor will treat any LaTeX code involving backslashes as markdown and screw it up (rufflewind.com/2016-12-14/from). Is this going to be a problem for attempts to mix formatted text with mathematics?

@11011110 @MartinEscardo @agdakx when posts are federated, the content is only sent in html format, so that's a problem for the servers producing the formatted text!
Needless to say, if we added formatted text here, it'd have to support latex

@11011110 @MartinEscardo @agdakx (personally, I'm not keen on markdown, largely because of these kinds of mutual incompatibilities in the syntax and the proliferation of extensions to support different outputs. The input method could just be a WYSIWYG widget, directly producing html...)

@11011110 @MartinEscardo @agdakx though it would be on-brand to implement text-mode tex! {\it curly braces}, anyone?

@christianp @11011110 @agdakx I am not keen of WYSIWYG.

@christianp @11011110 @MartinEscardo @agdakx basic markdown please (URL syntax, lists, back quotes for literal strings, pairs of triple back quotes for multiline stuff like code fragments).

A Mastodon instance for programming language theorists and mathematicians. Or just anyone who wants to hang out.