Re: real subscripts and superscripts?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Per,

    Are real subcripts/superscripts planned?

There has been no specific plan to date, for this or any of the many
other things lacking in Texinfo.  Your message is very helpful in that
regard.

    (2) Introduce new @sub and @sup commands (or @subscript/@superscript

@sub and @sup sound good to me.  The only complication I can think of is
that \sup already exists in TeX (typesets the mathematical operator
"sup", three roman letters).  It would not be feasible to distinguish
@sup from \sup, although of course it would be trivial to create \supop
or some such to still be able to access it.  I rather suspect that the
number of existing Texinfo documents that use TeX's \sup is zero.

    In info or plaintext: ^TEXT
    In HTML: <sup>TEXT</sup>
    In DocBook: <superscript>TEXT</superscript>
    In XML: I suggest <sup>TEXT</sup>
    In TeX inside @math: ^{TEXT}
    In TeX otherwise: use a macro ...

That all sounds fine to me.  I only wonder about Info/plaintext needing
some kind of delimiter in the case where TEXT is multiple characters.
As in address@hidden is different from address@hidden, but both would be
represented by x^2y given the above.  Maybe address@hidden should go to
x^(2y) in Info.

That's a math example so I suppose people should use @math, although you
can be sure that once the feature exists, it will get (ab)used for
everything possible.  I'm not sure if there are examples of textual
super/subscripts where parens or something would be desirable.  I can't
think of any; something like address@hidden is readable enough as 1^st (ugly
enough, too).

Patrice, Gavin, wdyt?

Thanks,
Karl