How does one express a definite integral in ASCII?
If you need to express it in an e-mail message, and you are limited to plain text and have no way of knowing what settings the intended recipient may have or what fonts may be installed on his/her computer, you are probably best in writing it out as "the integral from a to b of f(x)dx" or the like.
And woe be unto you if you need to send a whole page of triple integrals . . .
(Seriously, in such a case you would probably be best off either using the symbol fonts on your computer to create a Word document which you then turn into a .pdf file, or, if you're trying to show him/her something in a book, scan it as an image file, then send it as attachment.)
Now, if you know that s/he has LATEX or Mathematica or something (and you have the same), you can take advantage of those to create a file which will display mathematical characters and expressions properly when read by the same program. Or if you know that the recipient has the same fonts you do or a font with the complete Unicode character set, you can type things in that font and it "should" look the same when it comes up on the screen at the other end, but of course you know what that means . . .
-- Ronn! :)
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