🚀 go-pugleaf

|>Is LaTeX sufficiently common to use as a medium?  It has just about everything
|>you might want, and it is high-level enough that you can still read the source
|>(well, most of the time, anyway :-)
|>
|>\sum_{i=0}^p a_i y_{n-i} = \sum_{l=0}^q b_i \xi_{n-i}
|
|I think it's going to come down to a war between TeX and eqn.  Each is more
|common in some environments.  Expressive power is similar; the eqn version
|of the above is (assuming I've read the TeX correctly):
|
|sum from i=0 to p a sub i y sub {n-i} = sum from l=0 to q b sub i xi sub {n-i}
								   ^^
Probably should be \(*x (Greek Xi).

|Sticking strictly to readability, and disregarding the who's-got-which-
|software issue, I think eqn comes out ahead -- fewer silly backslashes and
|fewer artifacts of the odd character set Knuth used.

If one doesn't like _ and ^ one can always do this

\def\sub{_}
\def\sup{^}
$\sum\sub{i=0}\sup p a\sub i y\sub{n-i} = \sum\sub{l=0}\sup q b\sub i \xi\sub{n-i}$

which might look better with full braces

$\sum\sub{i=0}\sup{p} a\sub{i} y\sub{n-i} = \sum\sub{l=0}\sup{q} b\sub{i} \xi\sub{n-i}$

Looks even better than eqn to me since you can tell which scripts
belongs to which symbols. What's the big deal?