On 10 Oct 2016, at 21:24, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unic...@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote: > >> We need reliable plain-text notation systems. Otherwise distinctions we wish >> to encode may be lost. > > We have no need to make such distinctions in "plain text”.
You mightn’t. > It's convenient to have major distinctions easily accessible without > font hacking, Yes, indeed. > but there's no need to have every notation one might dream up forcibly > incorporated into "plain text”. Hyperbole. > In particular, for super/subscripts, which is where we came in, even > the benighted souls using Word still typically recognize and can use > LaTeX notation. I can’t use LaTeX notation. I don’t use that proprietary system. And don’t you dare tell me that I am benighted, or using Word. Neither applies. On 10 Oct 2016, at 21:31, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unic...@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote: > On 2016-10-10, Hans Åberg <haber...@telia.com> wrote: >> It is possible to write math just using ASCII and TeX, which was the >> original idea of TeX. Is that want you want for linguistics? > > I don't see the need to do everything in plain text. Of course not. You’re a programmer. (Mathematical typesetting is not my concern.) > Because phonetics has a much small set of symbols, I do kwəɪt ləɪk > biːɪŋ eɪbl tʊ duː ðɪs, and because they're also used in non-specialist > writing, it's useful to have the symbols hacked into Unicode instead > of hacked into specialist fonts. > But subscripts? No need. And yet we use such things. I have an edition of the Bible I’m setting. Big book. Verse numbers. I like these to be superscript so they’re unobtrusive. Damn right I use the superscript characters for these. I can process the text, export it for concordance processing, whatever, and those out-of-text notations DON’T get converted to regular digits, which I need. Michael
