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 Re: inputenc text (and/or math) Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> Fri, 9 Feb 2001 09:50:16 +0100 text/plain (54 lines) Bill,  > > but isn't this ambiguity already present anyway in TeX? and those  > > interfaces have to deal with it? E.g., if you write 1+2 without  > > explicitly marking it as a math formula you get a text string 1+2 not  > > $1+2$  >  > Whether or not text is in math mode is an important authoring issue  > that requires explicit author indication. that's what i was trying to say, didn't I? the ambiguity is already there and therefore needs explicit author indication already now.  > For example:  >  > \begin{quote}  > Everyone knows that the 2 most important numbers are $0$ and $1$\@.  > \end{quote} nice example.  > But inasmuch as LaTeX does not come with its own fonts, it seems to me  > that the pragmatic thing would be to provide dual handling of \alpha  > etc. when possible with the fonts at hand and unified handling otherwise. the problem that I think you are underestimating is that there is far more to math then unicode code point specification. Unicode has the unfortunate believe that if two distinct character that by default "look" the same could very well be presented by the same unicode code point. this is not the case as there is additional sematic information to the glyph which makes them from the language "mathematics" different characters. this is also true for some natural languages which got some of their code points being scattered around just because a few of their characters already appeared in some legacy keyboard encoding so if i say \foo in math i do not only denote a unicode char but also its mathematical type, eg, this is a relation or a binary operator or ... so the same glyph might have different representations and only a single one of those could be represented if you would try to make \alpha and \textalpha being addressed by a single command.  > P.S. I assume that this discussion, which began with your questions  > about changing over to the T1 fontenc, is about LaTeX3 and not about  > the next 2E (unless the next 2E is to be 3). it is mostly about 2e* or 2e+ in my book, ie the collection of packages starting with x... which are currently being added to the project web site. they run on top of 2e but once being stable and forming a whole might as well provide the conceptual basis for a final kernel rewrite. at least this is my view right now. frank