From: rusin@vesuvius.math.niu.edu (Dave Rusin) Subject: Re: Writing equations to the newsgroup Date: 18 Oct 1999 16:32:49 GMT Newsgroups: sci.math In article <7uet9j$992$1@oslo-nntp.eunet.no>, Kjetil Grytnes wrote: >Is there any standard way to write equations, when you are addressing the >newsgroup? > >To be specific: How to write the Integral Symbol, omega, Sum, Greek letters >etc? You just did! If you really know what you're talking about, the symbolism shouldn't be much of a problem. You can use Latin letters for variables and nearly avoid Greek letters. You can write "x squared" or "x^2" or "x**2" and people will figure it out. Just avoid the non-ASCII (and especially non-ISO) characters your PC may tempt you with, since you have no way of knowing how they will look by the time they reach someone else's screen. (e.g. x² looks like "x squared" to me but I guarantee it's going to be gibberish to someone.) I wrote some notes for my students about sending mathematics electronically; you'll see there are several options you can use as needed (e.g. spell it out; ASCII art; TeX style, etc.) See collection/how-to-read I should add that a lot of people seem to use newsreaders which allow the insertion of characters which are not displayed on _their_ newsreader, but rather interpreted in some way. This is a bad idea, since there is no telling what _other_ newsreaders will strip and/or interpret. Two classes of postings are notable in this way. People who read news through a web browser often post with a lot of embedded HTML codes. Don't do that. What other people see may look like 
X2 i.e.
         <math>X<sup>2</sup></math>
or some such mess. Other people -- and I think it's people who read news through a MIME-aware mailer, but I'm not certain -- often post messages which include a lot of escape sequences embedding ISO8859 codes as ASCII strings. This is particularly annoying in mathematics since the escape character is evidently an equals sign "=" meaning that a visible equals sign needs itself to be encoded with an escape sequence. These peoples' posts include lines like 1 + 1 =3D 2 (If that looks OK to you, it looks like 1 + 1 =3D3D 2 to me.) There are also people who post using whatever proprietary standards Microsoft has picked for a given month :-) Avoid those, too. >Where can I find this standards? The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from :-) dave