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Subject:
From:
"William F. Hammond" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 17 May 2001 12:32:16 -0400
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I think that we might want to look ahead to the time of having freely
available DVI readers in which we can search for symbols inside math
zones.

How might that work?

Point the "mouse" (or the light pencil or ...) at the symbol.  If
there is an underlying and "identified" symbol, a name for that symbol
in ordinary word-characters(*) (in the sense of international
character sets) is disclosed by the DVI reader to the user in some
way.  In order for that string to be disclosed, the author would need
to have provided it; for the most part it is not there now except
possibly in someone's dvi special.

When I pointed to the Connolly note several days ago, it was because
Connolly there takes the attitude that a character is any "atom" of
information.  Mathematicians clearly need to be able to create their
own characters in this sense.

So, for example, in gellmu one might have, along the lines suggested
by Roozbeh,

\mathsym{\imag}{\mbox{i}}
\mathsym{\ii}{i}

where \imag and \ii can only be used inside math (but since gellmu is
really SGML one relies on the validator rather than on \ensuremath),
and the word-character strings "imag" and "ii" become the names of
searchable symbols (if that is what the author wants).  (Of course,
we all know that the name "\i" is already taken.)

Note, however, these two examples might get merged in some presentation
formats such as "text/chalk-talk".

The optional third argument of \mathsym is for semantic information
that could be used locally on an author's platform to make things come
out right in MathML.

                                      -- Bill

* The notion of word-character in the context of international
character sets exists in GNU Emacs, version 20+, for use with regular
expressions, i.e., \w matches any word character and \W matches any
non-word-character.  (There still may be the opportunity at this stage
for quibbling about the exact nature of the concept.)

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