Frank Mittelbach schrieb:

> > If the standard inputenc files are changed, I strongly plea for "dual use"
> > characters. The standard ASCII characters with a few exceptions can be used
> > in text and math as well. A user expects the high character not to be
> > different
> > in this respect.

> depends on what dual means. if you mean that you want the result of a key
> mapping (eg \"a) be available text or math then

No, no, I didn't want to go that far ...

> instead i would think something like \DeclareInputTextAndMath should be
> offered for those languages/keyboards where a dual nature for input "keys"
> really makes sense, greek and cyrillic comes to mind.

Yes, this was my intention. If I type "×" (the times sign in
Latin-1,2,3, and 4) I want that it works both in text and in math mode giving
something sensible (i.e. \textmultiply or \times resp.) I don't want to
have the command \times in text mode and \textmultiply in math mode necessarily
(though it might lower the burden of memorising commands).

> \DeclareInputTextAndMath{<somenumber>}{\textalpha}{\alpha}
>
> you may have meant that as well, have you?

Yes, and the syntax looks fine to me.

--J"org Knappen

P.S.
> [...] i strongly plea for math only accepts the small set of real
> ascii, ie
>
> 0-9  a-z A-Z  !"/()=?`'+*<>|,;.:-
> plus commands
>
> by default (repeat: default).

There are two characters which are pretty useless in math, namely '"' (the
double quote) and '`' (the grave accent). The former fact is real good luck
because it allows TeX fomulae in HTML ALT-tags without breaking HTML syntax.
The later is just a cutiosity, but without AMS fonts there isn't any
sensible symbol mapping to '`'.