Halloechen!
Barbara Beeton <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> timothy murphy asked,
>
> > And isn't it quite sensible to distinguish between text and maths?
>
> and torsten bronger responded,
>
> XML doesn't do it and I find this very convenient. In (La)TeX, for
> many characters you need different commands for text and math mode.
> I'd love to have a typesetting system to which I could pass a say
> 'small Greek letter alpha', and it would just work in every context.
> No font families, no encodings, no active/special characters, no
> babel settings, and no modes to worry about. Wonderful ...
>
> not quite. i'm with tim here.
>
> for math publication, it's traditional to have variables in
> italic. it's also traditional to have theorems in italic.
> unless it's marked as math, how can you tell that "a" in a
> theorem is a variable or the english indefinite article?
> knuth tried to avoid this by
> - using a slanted font instead of italic for theorems
> - making a math italic that is ever so slightly wider than
> text italic
> but it still definitely requires marking a math "a" as math.
You're right, the program -- or XML file format -- must provide a
way to mark math areas, and it must apply rules or whatever to
typeset accordingly.
But I said "many characters you need different commands for text and
math mode". In other words, those rules are not enough at all. I
wrote (yet another ;) set of Unicode --> LaTeX replacements, and
it's full of "\ifmmode ... \else ... \fi" constructs. So I must be
aware of the current mode for *most* characters. One line says
e.g.:
0x107 cacute "\ifmmode \acute{c}\else \'{c}\fi{}"
My dream is to just insert the UTF-8 sequence of 0x107 and it
works. Of course, the "cacute" doesn't make sense in math mode, and
therefore LaTeX doesn't support such things, however I cannot tell
XML authors which characters they are allowed to type. Even the
standard latin1 inputenc option isn't math-proof.
Tschoe,
Torsten.
--
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
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