First let me apologize for the late reply. My internet connection thought for
some reason that it had to simulate a stack exchange (up, down, down, up,
down, down, down), but an electrician has now convinced it to stay up.
On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 06:11:47PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
OTOH, if you change it to [$x^2y = z_1$], then people that copy you
will be likely to write [$x% = x/100$], even without reading
[[Wikipedia:How does one edit a math page]] or whatever.
They will quickly notice that the end result is not what they expected and
then either go and read the manual anyway, or simply write ''x''% =
''x''/100 or [$x$]% = [$x$]/100.
Perhaps it would be more profitable just to have a
system that handles
scripts and not the rest of LaTeX, for ordinary use (that is, use without
the \sum s and \mapsto s of this world). This thought is expanded upon
below.
Your suggestion to replace <sub>..</sub> with _{..} and
<sup>..</sup> with
^{..} will have my vote anyway. However, I would still plead for having also
LaTeX in-line formula. One of Axel's motivation for LaTeX is that we should
be able to fairly easy exchange articles with
planetmath.org. I agree with
that and that would mean that you want to be able to do LaTeX in sentences.
It is also one of the reasons why we should have a markup similar to $..$
because that would make the conversion (by hand) simpeler.
(You can continue to try to convince me to use
'' and '''
in every situation instead of <i> and <b>, while this is going on.)
I will leave that to your own conscience. :-) There's no chance to get rid
of <B> as long as the system supports it and many users prefer it as their
notation.
-- Jan Hidders