No it won't. It will allow a bunch of people to skim-read detailed research publications and miss all the nuances that matter. No equation, no matter how many colours and arrows you cram into it, has any meaning on it's own. If you want to know what the author means by each of the symbols, read the damn paper.
Yes, in some fields certain symbols are known by tradition to mean something and older papers that were published with a limited audience in mind omitted some descriptions which is awfully annoying, but this is solved by having a section describing what your abbreviations and symbols refer to, not with highlighter spam.
> It will allow a bunch of people to skim-read detailed research publications and miss all the nuances that matter.
I have to disagree, there’s nothing stopping readers from doing this already, I think it’s quite common
I do agree that one needs to actually read the paper to really understand the context of some equation, but honestly flipping between the abbreviation table or the dense prose of “where x is foo, y is bar, zzz” it’s just not readable. I don’t think it’s would make sense to use this style for every equation ever, but I think it has utility
I disagree. These annotations help to bind the variables to the context and the “detailed nuances”.
Yes this is called a lookup table, and while it can seem obvious to you when you have spent 1y working on the same subject, it is not for the others.
People will anyway skim-read it, as I do, and put it aside for detailed reading, if the overall idea is good or if I found an interesting technique.
Anyway, the best papers I read were short and concise. Cf. historically Lebesgue paper about measure theory and his correspondance with Picard, compared to Borel’s theory.
Yes, in some fields certain symbols are known by tradition to mean something and older papers that were published with a limited audience in mind omitted some descriptions which is awfully annoying, but this is solved by having a section describing what your abbreviations and symbols refer to, not with highlighter spam.