Use LaTeX or Markdown for the Standard?

[DavidSagan]

Should LaTeX or Markdown be used for creating the Standard? One consideration is that the Standard will have many equations and while Markdown has come a long way in being able to display mathematics, there are still issues. Consider:

$$ \begin{aligned} KL(\hat{y} || y) &= \sum_{c=1}^{M}\hat{y}_c \log{\frac{\hat{y}_c}{y_c}} \\ JS(\hat{y} || y) &= \frac{1}{2}(KL(y||\frac{y+\hat{y}}{2}) + KL(\hat{y}||\frac{y+\hat{y}}{2})) \end{aligned} $$

While what is rendered is fairly good, the distance between the double vertical bars, $$||$$ (which is correctly rendered in this sentence!) has too much spacing in the above. And trying to adjust the spacing using LaTeX's "\!" negative space in the above equation results in an explicit "!" character instead of a space adjustment.

Having struggled, over the years, with getting equations to look right in LaTeX, given that using Markdown will be harder if not impossible in some situations, my vote is for using LaTeX. What do people think about this?

[mattsignorelli]

I vote LaTeX.

On an unrelated note, should we set up Github discussions for this repo, since we can actually have polls there? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions/quickstart

[DavidSagan]

@mattsignorelli I have not used them but discussions look like they can be useful for some stuff.

[jlvay]

Latex sounds good to me. We could have an Overleaf document linked to github: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Git_Integration_and_GitHub_Synchronization. LBNL provides access to Overleaf Pro if we wish to do that.

[DavidSagan]

The problem with Overleaf is that there is no control over changes being made. So having Overleaf pull from GitHub is OK, but GitHub should not pull from Overleaf.