There is a book, a biography of a French mathematician. It had copies of emails sent between himself and a colleague.
The plain ASCII emails were in English and, because they were discussing mathematical ideas, also contained short LaTeX sequences.
The thing is, they were not using a program to translate the latex into graphics, they were just reading it. It was a convenient notation for short expressions.
Compare that with a programming forum on the web. Program source code is plain ASCII, and yet, forums use a graphical user interface, that requires an enormous amount of data to show simple programs and comments.
Quite a contrast.
The plain ASCII emails were in English and, because they were discussing mathematical ideas, also contained short LaTeX sequences.
The thing is, they were not using a program to translate the latex into graphics, they were just reading it. It was a convenient notation for short expressions.
Compare that with a programming forum on the web. Program source code is plain ASCII, and yet, forums use a graphical user interface, that requires an enormous amount of data to show simple programs and comments.
Quite a contrast.