Re: behavior of @math with HTML output

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 09:27:22PM -0500, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
> TeX has an \ifmmode conditional that is true in math mode; @var/\var and
> other marking macros could be adjusted to mark their arguments appropriately
> when invoked in math mode.  Are there other macros that would be appropriate
> in @math?  At first glance, @var seems unique here.

It's a good question.  I understand why someone would want to use @var
inside @math, for consistent appearance of variables.

It already appears to work well with texinfo.tex, with

  @math{@var{foo}\over @var{bar}} finds the quotient of @var{foo} by
  @var{bar}.  @math{\sqrt{@var{radicand}}} finds the square root of
  @var{radicand}. 

producing good results (even using the smaller font for foo and bar).

It also works well enough with MathJax with Patrice's latest change,
using \mathit for the variable names (there appears to be no "\mathsl" so
there is a slight difference in font style in and out of math - this
seems unavoidable).

l2h and t4h settings still output "@var" literally even with
'-c CONVERT_TO_LATEX_IN_MATH=1'.  I'm going to spend some time
investigating this.