asciimathml VS tectonic

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 may want to try https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic, which downloads files from TeXLive on-demand.

v2 has improved TeX engine lookup, improved PDF template look&feel, proper support for MS Windows (where it comes integrated with the Tectonic engine) and a few more new features.

There's https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic but I think the issue with that idea is that sure, you can re-implement TeX (it's sufficiently simple) in Rust and then run LaTeX packages on top of it, but then you're back to LaTeX and all its weirdness so you haven't really gained anything compared to LaTeX itself.

In terms of TeX, I would recommend taking a look at tectonic, a self-contained TeX distribution that auto-installs packages you need when you need them, and “just works” when you call the binary to compile… Because screw messing around with package managers, CTAN and XeTeX. I’ve been using it for around a year and it’s so much easier than any other TeX distribution.

For example, you can have your main application in something like Deno/Node/python that acts as a server, and then delegate the actual pdf generation to tectonic (https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic) or Typst https://typst.app/blog/2023/beta-oss-launch/

tectonic: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic

How does it compare with Tectonic?

It's sad that Tectonic conversion to Rust[1] was never finished. For now it's just a wrapper around C and C++ code. By far, it was the most promising thing in this distribution.

[1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459

The only thing I've seen is https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic but that's an actual re-implementation of TeX Rust.