On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 11:45:39PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Per,
>
> In info or plaintext: ^TEXT
> In HTML: <sup>TEXT</sup>
> In DocBook: <superscript>TEXT</superscript>
> In XML: I suggest <sup>TEXT</sup>
> In TeX inside @math: ^{TEXT}
> In TeX otherwise: use a macro ...
>
> That all sounds fine to me. I only wonder about Info/plaintext needing
> some kind of delimiter in the case where TEXT is multiple characters.
> As in x@sup{2y} is different from x@sup{2}y, but both would be
> represented by x^2y given the above. Maybe x@sup{2y} should go to
> x^(2y) in Info.
In math, Info/Plaintext already relies on {} to separate "arguments"
because it is how TeX does. So, I think that in @math, when doing Info
x@sup{2}y should be x^{2}y.
> That's a math example so I suppose people should use @math, although you
> can be sure that once the feature exists, it will get (ab)used for
> everything possible. I'm not sure if there are examples of textual
> super/subscripts where parens or something would be desirable. I can't
> think of any; something like 1@sup{st} is readable enough as 1^st (ugly
> enough, too).
Out of @math, I am not sure. I think that using () or {} would be ugly,
but then your example above shows the case of an ambiguous case. I
would really like to avoid having to known if there is something after
the @sub or @sup to add {} or () to disambiguate, and do not do it if
there is a space.
Maybe I would favor using x^{2}y in textual context too, since there is
no good solution, and it is simpler to implement and explain as it is
the same as in @math.
--
Pat
