The COMBINING RIGHT ARROW ABOVE combination on that second line rendered both the letter and the arrow as two separate squares, on macOS, in fully-updated Chrome.

It maybe 2017, but this doesn't quite work yet. Not to mention how it falls apart as soon as I want some _clever_ typesetting. Don't get me wrong: I think we can do better than TeX, and in a lot of cases common characters like e.g. Greek characters might be fine, but, uh, we aren't there yet.

Well, there already is something like that: UTN #28 (http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/).

Great find, thank you!!

I hope the combining diacritics will not be relegated too far off the BMP.

I don't know how you would type those characters though, other than auto complete from the TeX commands?

Yeah, TeX name autocomplete or better yet free unicode description search triggered by \ is the obvious direction. (think github emoji search, like how :ship also offers :anchor: and :package:)

https://kasperpeulen.github.io/PressAndHold/Unicode/ was a novel attempt. [source: https://github.com/kasperpeulen/PressAndHold] The trick is you long-press any letter, e.g. press Shift+A and don't release => you get a popup offering 𝐴 ∀ 𝒜 𝔄 (use arrors & Enter to select) Long-pressing letters is amusingly unnatural, I have to make a conscious effor :-)

Apropos unicode notations, that demo was made for https://github.com/kasperpeulen/CoffeeTeX, a unicode AsciiMath-inspired notation.

Yeah, the original design philosophy of AsciiMath was to make that input symbol something in ASCII that looks kind of like the desired symbol. The idea of supporting Unicode as an alternative is reasonable idea and probably one we should look at (feel free to make a pull request).

I see unicode as both an alternative rendering for text based devices, and an alternative input (because on my keyboard, the right Alt key followed by a gives me α, which is faster than typing alpha)

A couple of ideas:

- Keyboard shortcuts, like for diacritics on european keyboards.

- On screen keyboard, like for phones and tablets.

But entry is not the important part - rendering is.

> But entry is not the important part - rendering is.

If that was true, TeX already has us covered.

TeX does not render in my email, in hacker news, in reddit, in ascii files (that I edit with leafpad or vim or anything else depending on my needs)