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lamby
Needs more tornado. Or, err, twisted.web.
Dilpil
Wow, I'm glad I don't have to use LaTex.
weaksauce
Yeah it's OK for typesetting books but very verbose for chatting. Though if you need to chat about integrals and the like I guess you are stuck with it.
almost
We're just talking about LaTeX's math mode here. Are there any more concise and easier ways to type math on a normal keyboard and have it display in a pretty way?
alien_acorn
Maple will take input like

  y=int(x^2,x=0..100)
and turn it into pretty print. That seems more natural than LaTeX. LaTeX is for getting exactly what you want on paper, at the expense of ease of typing.
tesseract
Mathematica will do

    In[1]:= Unevaluated[y = Integrate[x^2, {x, 0, 100}]] // TeXForm
    Out[1]= y=\int_0^{100} x^2 \, dx
which in that case is rather pointless but I suppose it could be helpful in the case of something more complicated.

Maybe Maple can do that too; I don't know since I've only ever used Maple for one 20-minute session and don't have a copy handy.

jacobolus
Yes, it can, and the input syntax is much nicer, even:

  > latex('y = int(x^2, x=0..100)')
  
  y=\int _{0}^{100}\!{x}^{2}{dx}
yummyfajitas
Is that harder than $\int_{0}^{100} x^2 dx$? Your version is only 4 chars less, and mine looks more like the actual math...

LaTeX has the added advantage that most mathematicians have it in muscle memory. (I have latex in emacs muscle memory, so I have a hard time using mathim.)

cracki
i find the non-latex version better because it has fewer $ and \ and {}
dhimes
I've been playing with Open Office Math lately, and using it to convert to MathML. It may be worth a look (behaves like the formula insert in OO Writer).
catzaa
Nice. Would be nice if it use MathML (or something like that) instead of images.
btn
The point of using LaTeX to render an image is that it preserves the beautiful and precise layout that only the (La)TeX engine can give.
catzaa
Maybe. I have used latex extensively (and is now currently busy typing my dissertation in Latex). I personally think that Latex is a bit overrated.

There can be much better programs and Latex's applicability is fairly limited. It takes hours to get something to look right.

dhimes
Still? Christ it tooks hours when I typed my dissertation-- and that was pushing 20 years ago.
DaniFong
The interface for Mathematica, which typically consists of bracketing special characters with escape characters, is a lot less cumbersome than LaTeX for writing something quickly. For example, the integral of the square root of x is entered

esc int esc ctrl-2 x left arrow esc dd esc x. Shift-enter evaluates the thing to 2/3 x^3/2.