Re: @math in manual

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 06:53:45PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Patrice,
> 
> Your criticisms of the @math documentation are well-founded.
> 
>     since makeinfo removes matching braces { }.
> 
> I never exactly realized that.  Seems unfortunate, since then
> @math{a^{bc}} comes out ambiguously?!

Indeed. Maybe this is a bug then.

>     @-commands are used in @math
> 
> True enough.  I was thinking of something like @math{\sigma}, where (I
> believe) you have to use \sigma and not @sigma, but had neglected to
> think about normal Texinfo @-commands.
> 
>     'it does not try to interpret the mathematics formatting in any special
> 
> That wording doesn't seem right, but I can agree with the underlying
> point.

You'll have to redo the wording in any case...
 
> What I'd really like to do with @math is support it -- that is, add all
> the mathematical symbol commands to Texinfo, super/subscripts
> etc.  However, that's obviously not going to happen any time soon, so I

What I do currently in texi2html is to use httexi to format the @math.
Maybe something similar could be done by makeinfo, too?

> agree it'd be good to document what really happens now.  I was more or
> less intentionally glossing over the details since I knew the whole
> command was rather insufficient.

That's a good reason not to document too much. I won't add the brace
stuff since it is not obvious that it is right.

--
Pat