grrrr Java 7 and LibreOffice are not friends!

Ha ha, there's a Bible reference in paragraph 31 of the TeX82 source.

@Hendrik (or any other Markdown expert): Is there a way to emphasize only part of a word? Simply writing *foo*bar doesn't work.

Let's try underscores: _foo_bar

<i>foo</i>bar - ouch.

Some markdowns do do emphasis in the middle, but later ones don't. You should be able to do the raw HTML on SE (clearly not here).

@AndrewStacey HTML doesn't seem to work in comments either.

avery**long**word - I give up =P.

Ah, in comments. No, I think that the markup is very restrictive for comments.

Actually I just wanted to emphasize the last word of a quotation. *word*" works, but *word*” (with proper quotes) doesn't.

@AndrewStacey The Instiki idea is quite interesting. I wonder if it could also be used to collaborate with people who don't really know LaTeX? Also, what kind of package support does it have or how easy is it to adapt new packages to the markup?

@AlanMunn Part of the point of wikis is that the markup is easy to learn. Instiki's markup is an extended form of markdown together with maths support (provided through itex2MML). What I've done is essentially tack on a front-end that lets me compose the stuff initially in LaTeX and then convert it to the right markup.

When writing maths, I find myself really wanting to use macros, but you can't do that in wiki-syntax (and I think it is wrong to have that capability). So this is my way of having my cake and eating it: I can have macros, but no-one else has to ever see exactly how I define them.

Thinking about the package support, I guess the problem there is that the intermediate stage (the wiki) isn't all that flexible. There's only so much you can do with XHTML compared to TeX. So if you have absolutely no interest in having the XHTML version then this probably isn't such a great idea.

But there's nothing to stop you post processing the files. You can define a custom header. So then, say, all tables are actually done using <insert favourite table package here>. Then the wiki format wouldn't be so restrictive, but would help to impose a conformity since all tables genuinely would be typeset in the same way.

Anyway, those are just my initial thoughts ...

Why is LaTeX so difficult =(

As for the LaTeX export, to get an idea of what it looks like, search on the arxiv for papers by Jacques Distler. His latest few were written on an instiki wiki and then exported to LaTeX.

@JohnJamesSmith Because it can do a lot of things.

@AndrewStacey Thanks. The main problem for this sort of thing for my field is that there are absolutely necessary macros for formatting linguistic examples that would need to have their own markdown.

@AlanMunn Well, markdown is extendible. The maths support is done by an extension. So it wouldn't be impossible, but would need a bit of work. Is there an (X)HTML equivalent of what you need? (That's the real question to answer before deciding to do it on a wiki or not.)

@AndrewStacey I don't think I know enough about (X)HTML to be able to answer that question. The basic construct is essentially an enumeration like an equation number plus sub-lists within them; some sublists need to be unnumbered.

@AlanMunn: thanks for pointing my mistake, I thought it was better to remove the answer, as it doesn't add nothing new to the cause. :-)

@AlanMunn Nah, don't worry. =)

@AlanMunn Besides, I suspect the OP has a problem with babel, but that I don't know how to fix it. =P

@PauloCereda Maybe. Without the code, we won't know.

@AlanMunn Indeed.

This thread made me laugh:

v = Math.round(Math.cos(Math.PI/((v*2+1)+2)-2*v)); - It looks like the code I used to program during college. =P