Re: rethinking @def*

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 12:03:17AM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> With the changes to TeX output, assuming it is more or less final, I
> checked the differences between LaTeX and TeX, the differences are
> mainly attributable to the combinations or not of fonts (combination in
> LaTeX, not in TeX).  In many cases, we do not really care, we simply
> need to document that @r{@___{}} should be used.
> 
> There are two cases that are of interest, though, as they are likely to
> be important in practice:
> 
> @var in @deftype* is slanted typewriter in LaTeX but slanted roman in
> TeX.
> 
> @code (and @t) in @defn* is slanted typewriter in LaTeX but upright typewriter
> in TeX.
> 
> What you we do for those two cases?  Try to change one or the other
> formatting?  Document that the formatting can be different?

I think it would make sense to change LaTeX output to be like TeX output
for these two points.  We could change @var from \textsl{...} to something
like \textrm{\textsl{...}} or {\sl ...}.

It's possible that there could be some inconsistency between the
formatting of @var and @def* between output formats, as long as
there is consistency within each format.