Re: real subscripts and superscripts?

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 11:45:39PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Per,
> 
>     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.

In math, Info/Plaintext already relies on {} to separate "arguments"
because it is how TeX does.  So, I think that in @math, when doing Info
address@hidden should be x^{2}y.

> 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).

Out of @math, I am not sure.  I think that using () or {} would be ugly,
but then your example above shows the case of an ambiguous case.  I
would really like to avoid having to known if there is something after
the @sub or @sup to add {} or () to disambiguate, and do not do it if
there is a space.

Maybe I would favor using x^{2}y in textual context too, since there is
no good solution, and it is simpler to implement and explain as it is
the same as in @math.

-- 
Pat