asciimathml VS boxesandglue

Or ascii math, http://asciimath.org

Sure thing, a quick search yields Asciimath which seems at least at first glance as huge improvement in the syntax department: http://asciimath.org

As for LaTeX in general, Markdown beats it soundly in most aspects.

What are the syntax differences to https://asciimath.org?

I did some Googling, and thought AsciiMath is the answer (simply because it also contains "Ascii" in the name). Turns out it's a different solution.

Math syntax is a bit more challenging, because I'm sure no one wants 12 even if that would make the grammar simpler. Attempts to do this are thin on the ground: as you note, Markdown and other similar tools completely punted on math. AsciiMath is one idea, although not what you want in a full-fledged typesetting language.

I like to use asciimath for this, though I realize that it's not as powerful as LaTeX or MathJax. There's a decent Rust port: asciimath-rs.

There's this:

http://asciimath.org/

I wish someone would integrate this into pandoc so I could use it in rmarkdown.

You might also want to take a look at existing libraries how they generate PDF. For example the PDF backend library at https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue (from me). Or create simple documents with PDFTeX for example, PDFTeX produces clean output.

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua.

See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction.

I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming.

My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)