> On May 20, 2015, at 5:38 AM, Randy Read <rj...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > > Thanks, as always, to everyone for a thoughtful discussion!
Alternatively, as a scientific community, perhaps it is finally time for us to untwist Clippy, bending him backwards and forwards until he snaps at those horrid beady little eyeballs, ditch the Comic Sans, flip Redmond the bird, HTFU and learn to use LaTeX equation markup, and ask that our journals do the same. It really isn’t any harder than learning basic HTML (and predates it as one of the original mark-up languages). Journals and funding agencies should not be demanding that we use crappy broken and restrictive proprietary formats for submitting papers and proposals. Ascii text documents provide the ultimate form of universal interchangeability. The syntax is actually quite straightforward and easy to learn (or look up), eg: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics LaTeX allows you to focus on content rather than document formatting. Although it is definitely more badass to do this in vim, other ascii text editors often have very useful LaTeX functionality. (My favorite on OS X is TextMate, version 2 of which is now free. If you code on OS X, you should take a look at this.) Once you make the small investment of time learning LaTeX, it makes other tasks easier. For example, you can use jsMath to embed LaTeX-encoded equations (including chemistry symbols) in web pages, eg: http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsmath/examples/welcome.html
