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Vladimir Volovich <[log in to unmask]>
Wed, 31 Jan 2001 11:43:37 +0300
text/plain (35 lines)
"FM" == Frank Mittelbach writes:

 FM> for "symbols" like the above this can in fact be done this way
 FM> and a few symbols hare "historically defined this way, ie

 FM> \pounds -> \relax\ifmmode\mathsterling\else\textsterling

 FM> but you need the \relax to ensure that the right thing happens at
 FM> the beginning of tabular cells (timing problem in \halign)

 FM> and this is the problem: you can't do that to "letters", the use
 FM> of \relax there prohibits potential ligatures and not doing it
 FM> means your definition produce wrong results or blow up in certain
 FM> situations

there is a solution for this problem used in the mathtext package
available from
CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/supported/t2/etc/mathtext.{dtx,ins}

this package is referred to as experimental in the doculentation of
the cyrillic latex bundle.

the approach used in the mathtext package proved to be stable enough:
i know a lot of people do use it for `transparent' cyrillic letters in
math, and i did not hear about bug for a long time now. the mechanism
mostly works on a fontenc layer, rather than on inputenc.

so, something like this could be used to make even `letters' work in
both modes (however, mathtext currently only redefines
\DeclareTextSymbol, which is sufficient for cyrillic, but to make it
work for T1 font encoding, one needs to extend redefinitions of other
commands like composite declarations, etc).

        Best regards, -- Vladimir.

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