Support asciimath in Markdown fields

[Phyks]

Hi,

AsciiMath is a really convenient way to write maths inline à la Markdown.

MathJax supports it out of the box (see the "Getting started" section in the above link).

As Jupyter notebooks already make use MathJax, I guess it should not be really difficult to add support for AsciiMath in cells.

What do you think about it? This would ease writing small mathematical code, and not require to insert LaTeX in the cells.

The only issue I can think of is that the default configuration uses backticks (`) to delimit AsciiMath code, and this is already used in Markdown for inline code. So, the user should either escape them with a leading backslash (not really practical), or we should think about an alternative delimiter.

Thanks!

[takluyver]

I like the idea, but I don't want to make more ad-hoc extensions to Markdown syntax. We're hoping that CommonMark will come up with a proper extension syntax.

[opensource21]

Now we are over 3 years later. I fear waiting on CommonMark isn't a good option. AsciiMath and Jupiter Notebooks seems a good option a schools where Latex is a hard challenge. Specially for people who are visually handicapped this is a good solution. Would great to see it or perhaps in a specific branch?

[mr0re1]

3 years have passed again. Just checking in.