Recap syntax ideas for Markdown?

[Mark Smith]

Matthias Steffens wrote:

>On Wed, 6 Apr 2005 21:04:53 -0400 John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm just not sure how commonly subscript and superscript are used.
>
>Sorry to repeat myself, but for everyone who wants to use markdown to
>markup scientific or bibliographic texts, the lack of subscript and
>superscript in markdown is a real showstopper.
>
>There are a lot of scientific disciplines that don't need fancy math
>formatting and where italic, super/subscript and greek letters is all
>that's needed.


I agree with this entirely [1].

At the same time, I can understand that John doesn't want to squander (seen from his side) his remaining aces on this.

About the only thing other I can think of that doesn't involve either resorting to unicode characters or having to use awkward TeX-like syntax, would be to pick ^ for either superscript of subscript and to use ^^ for the other. I know its non-intuitive for both writing and reading, but I suspect its very "sticky" once learned. I'd accept something like this to keep things ASCII and quick, though it won't please purists.

mark.


[1]  To the extent that I have long played with the idea of something Markdown-esque that would enable me to write a kind of shorthand TeX for local (as opposed to environment or preamble) modifiers that I could pour into template files. (Alas I'm lousy in the suitable scripting languages.)