RE: arXiv updates and MathML Intent

Thank you David. I think that’s a good motivation.




From: David Carlisle <david.carlisle@nag.co.uk<mailto:david.carlisle@nag.co.uk>>
Date: Thursday, 25. Sep 2025 at 10:40 AM
To: www-math@w3.org <www-math@w3.org<mailto:www-math@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: arXiv updates and MathML Intent


So what is supposed to be the pronunciation of the box symbol there supposing to represent the cartesian product of graphs ? □

If you just have the box character it's going to be read as box or white box or something it will not be brilliant but will be understandable.

It may be a while before authors routinely add more specific intents (although \MathMLintent is defined in the latex-dev format if you got an update to texlive this morning.)


However hopefully even now authors are not usually directly accessing the character but defining a more semantically meaningful command and so could do


\DocumentMetadata{tagging=on}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\NewDocumentCommand\graphprod{}{\MathMLintent{graph-product}{\mdlgwhtsquare}}
\begin{document}
$A \graphprod B$
\end{document}



which produces the following MathML using lualatex-dev if you have LaTeX2e <2025-11-01> pre-release-2 which was released this morning.


<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"<http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML>>
 <mi>𝐴</mi>
 <mi intent="graph-product" mathvariant="normal">□</mi>
 <mi>𝐵</mi>
</math>


which gets read as


A graph product of B


(I don't think it should read "of" here but that's an implementation detail, as is the fact that we ought to generate mo rather than mi for the infix operator, which is a known issue)


David







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