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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

Pandoc isn't used by this VSCode plugin, so I'm not sure why that's relevant? Generating a PDF from Pandoc depends on LaTeX, which is over 2GB. Definitely not a solution for "everywhere".

Also there are some arguably nicer alternatives to just shoving LaTeX syntax into markdown, for example http://asciimath.org.

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LaTeX itself isn't over 2GB. The complete texlive distribution is about that large, but that's everything and the kitchen sink.

You can install a small base which comes in ~150mb, then add packages as you need.

and then 90 seconds later you'll find yourself running `sudo apt-get texlive-full` because some mysterious font somewhere is wedging up the gears and it's not worth sorting out.

Yeah, fair enough. On MacTeX or texlive on Arch, it usually takes me a few iterations of `tlmgr install` runs before I have everything I need. "collection-fontsrecommended" is usually the (meta) package I install these days.

I wish texlive would move to rolling updates, or at-least make distribution upgrades easier.

Arg, this reads like LaTeX without the backslashes and with minor inconsistencies. Why not just use a proper subset of LaTeX math notation instead of inventing yet another syntax?

Because, sometime you don't need all the whistles, but only a subset.

Curious, what inconsistencies does asciimath have?

Probably for the same reason that we don't create modern programming languages using a subset of FORTRAN syntax: because we can do better.

Note that one of the advantages of asciimath is that it maps unambiguously to MathML.

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