Re: comments re draft version 2.0

>  it would be an arbitrary choice to use it.

Not arbitrary. For many people who have editors with which they are
familiar, which can do brace matching and command completion on tex
syntax expressions, a tex input form rather than an XML input form would
I suspect be very useful. (Or to put it another way, I intent to provide
it. Whether or not it turns out to be useful, we shall see:-)


> The point is that you would require a "package" that completely changed
> the whole manner of entering equations. Again, yes that could be expressed
> using TeX-programming, since the syntax of TeX can be changed almost
> arbitrarily, but it would be unrecognizable to authors as the TeX they
> know and (like us) love.

Latex users routinely load all kinds of packages that provide new syntax
with different semantics, for all kinds of things from journal front
matter to chessboard layout to commutative diagrams. A package as I 
outlined would be a fairly small thing both in implementation and in
user acceptance (certainly small compared to the other package I
mentioned which typesets from TeX using the xml input syntax).
 
If the choice is typing in unstructured plain TeX and only having
partially automatic translation to a usable XML syntax (assuming an
application requiring content markup) and typing in tex syntax but using
a package that constrained you to a particular syntax with automatic
translation to Content MathML, then I don't see why this should seem
strange or at all non tex-like to a typical latex user. (Plain users
of course get worried by any command not in the tex book, but they
probably wouldn't use mathml whatever you did:-)

David
wearing latex hat this time

Received on Tuesday, 11 April 2000 19:42:42 UTC