On 11/28/2014 11:01 AM, Karl Berry wrote:
Sure, sub/superscripts are most commonly used in math. Thus @math, as in @math{e=mc^2}. I never expected anything else to be used, certainly not clunky macros. This is why @math was created in the first place. Is your proposal really just working around makeinfo not recognizing ^ and _ in math in the first place?
My use case is primarily *not* math - I mainly want subscripts and superscripts. For example function prototypes: (list exp@sub{1} ... exp@sub{n}) Syntax descriptions: list = nil | (value@sup{+}) Language names: Schema as specified by R@sup{7}RS. However, I do have some need for math: A quaternion is a number that can be expressed in the form ‘w+xi+yj+zk’, where w, x, y, and z are real, and i, j, and k are imaginary units satisfying @math{i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = -1}. The magnitude of a quaternion is defined to be its Euclidean norm when viewed as a point in @math{R^4}. I want some sane way of writing i^2 and R^4 so I get tolerably-looking expressions with superscripts in both TeX andDocBook/HTML.
Having been drafting the documentation, I can say that it feels quite clean to say "use @sub/@sup for text, @math{^_...} for math". It's no problem to implement @sub/@sup being like ^ and _ in math mode and doing text in text mode, etc., but, I don't know, usage doesn't seem as clear. If I may dare to generalize a tiny bit -- in principle, I'd rather that we recognize TeX math in the first place than invent new Texinfo commands to do the same thing.
In the above example I don't care if I have to write @math{R^4} or @math{R@sup{4}}, as long as I don't have to use conditionals, and I get a <sup> when emitting HTML. -- --Per Bothner p...@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/