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