# Can math formula added to the markdown

Can greek letter, math formulation spec added to commonMark

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You can use Unicode for Greek letters or HTML (named) character references (vulgo “entities”) like &alpha;.

Inline formulas and block equations would be the domain of a future math extension, building upon existing conventions.

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There have been previous discussions:

Math extensions are widely implemented, but there is unfortunately no consensus on the syntax. If you want to discuss, let’s continue one of the above threads.

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Not directing this to you, it’s more of a reminder to us all (or the board admins): maybe it would make sense, to merge these threads or to restart discussion in one, and only one thread per feature / extension

I’m following up on this thread merely because it is the most recent one.

https://github.com/yzhang-gh/vscode-markdown is providing very nice support of math using the $. It doesn’t support $\$ (display mode).

Yes, just a few days ago, the development version was compatible with GitLab Flavored MarkDown by supporting Markdown+Math.

You can now use vscode to edit locally and view it in the GitLab repository. The only flaw I found is that for performance reasons, GitLab truncates after rendering a thousand characters contained in mathematical formulas on the mobile end.

I very much hope to see GitHub follow up.

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This is an old topic, but still very relevant and not resolved yet I think. Mathematical formulas are very important in several contexts, and having a standard syntax in CommonMark would be very desirable.

LaTeX is probably the most used syntax in the diferent Markdown flavors, however in my opinion LaTeX is not very readable (even a simple formulas like 1 / 2 = 0.5 is written as \frac{1}{2} = 0.5) which is against the main design goal of Markdown. For that reason I think AsciiMath would be much more readable:

http://asciimath.org/

With AsciiMath the natural formula is used instead 1 / 2 = 0.5 (which is pretty printed by MathJax), and it also provides greek letters like \alpha. AsciiMath supports pretty advanced mathematical symbols (and those continue to be highly readable) so I think would be enough in the vast majority of the cases. My team uses AsciiMath inside Doxygen comments (using Markdown) as internal documentation of our code (i.e. not usually read as HTML by directly as plain text in the source code), and the readability is now much better than when we used the LaTeX syntax (which is the usual approach in Doxygen).

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Indeed a math standard would be nice to have. but I’m unsure of this is a thing that CommonMark can handle as it is a very large topic