On 3/9/2013 6:01 PM, Stephan Stiller wrote:
'The Lancet' reportedly insists on the use of the raised decimal point
(http://www.download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/authors/artwork-guidelines.pdf)
and gives the instructions 'Type decimal points midline (ie, 23·4, not
23.4). To create a midline decimal on a PC: hold down ALT key and type
0183 on the number pad, or on a Mac: ALT shift 9.' On Windows, that
gives U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT.
And in this linked-to document it's raised to only what appears to be
half the x-height; I'd raise a multiplicative dot to half the
M-height. Philippe's post just now might relate to that in some way.
Math operators are usually aligned on the math center line. Wherever
that happens to be. However, for fully correct math layout, to require
"math mode" (i.e. global markup selecting math layout) is an appropriate
restriction and some minor infidelities in pure "plain text" rendering
of math are therefore tolerable.
Mathematical layout has all sorts of little idiosyncratic rules about
spacing etc. that are subtly different from regular text, even though
many characters can occur in both environments. That's why high-fidelity
math layout needs to first identify those areas of a document where math
layout rules apply. In TeX that's handled by using $ as an operator, in
other environments other conventions (including out of band styling) are
used.
A./
