Re: What Software to Type Math In?

Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <45hekvF6sb6oU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Marc Olschok <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
To do things with ASCII, you may be able to get away with
the clumsy diagramming of characters; this is not enough.

Well, this is why markup languages (as html and TeX) are so popular.

And we have our emails cluttered up with thousands of markup
characters and little content. I am interested in getting the
information efficiently, without all that clutter. Markup
languages are messy.

They provide a compromise between low-end input devices and (possible)
high-end output device.

[...]
I still use Berkeley mail for sending email or responding.
The email with this newsreader is like that as well. Email
sent by many of the fancier mailers lacks line breaks, and
can be difficult to handle.

There is no disagreement here. I also use ordinary text terminals
with fixed-width fonts and hard line breaks, but only wanted to remark
that different output media may have different demands.

Do they have different demands? Or are they just trying
to set up a user-"friendly" system which at least a very
large part of their users find to be an overly intricate
mass of arbitrary devices?

I have no idea what you mean. The visual demands for reading a book
are different from reading text at a 80x24 terminal as I do right now.


But here is the promised example you provided in favour of
plain ASCII:

Sure. The same point could be made against special fonts in mail.
Compare "Ji visited Wrzburg" to "Ji\v{r}\'\i\ visited W\"urzburg".
Observe, that I can type the left version directly into LaTeX.

If that right side is supposed to be LaTeX, I cannot read
it. what does the string of characters \v{r}\'\i\ mean? I
do know the TeX way of indication umlauts, but I do not
like it. I would not mind the European typewriter version
of having such things as umlauts and accents as non-spacing
superimposed characters.

The \v puts a "czech hook" accent over its argument, \' puts an / like
accent over its argument (which here indicates a long vowel), \i is a
dotless i and "\ " was just a leftover from the TeX source in order to
ensure a space (see e.g. the TeXbook). As I said, LaTeX can work with
different input encodings, so you would not need type these TeX makros.

But the interesting question is:
could you read the equivalent text on the left side?

I do not see anything corresponding to the hacek-r or
dotless i with an accent on the left side, or the u-umlaut
in Wurzburg, although I guessed that that was meant.

I thought as much. Would you have been able to guess any greek
characters which your newsreader would not have displayed?


However, my interest is not in producing linguistic text,
but mathematical notation added to English, for notes or
class assignments, or even for drafts of articles. So I
need at least the Latin and Greek alphabets, "standard"
mathematical symbols, and I am annoyed that {}\ are not
available for them, a convenient way to handle subscripts
and superscripts, and half lines would do well for that
even without smaller fonts. Bold face and such should be
handled by shifts, which may require typing escapes, but
would still appear as single characters (of different
lengths in binary) in the text file, the whole thing in
fixed width characters, so if I want to line things up I
have no problems. If I have to type "\alpha" to get a
small Greek alpha, I only want to see the small Greek
letter on the screen.

Nice for posting. I agree. Actually, this is how I produced the text:
I typed Ji`r'i visited W"urzburg and my editor generated the
appropriate characters (my keyboard does not provide them).
The same could be done with greek letters and other symbols.

This is the easy part. The point of my example was, that this is not
enough: before the software you use for _processing_ such texts
(like mailers, newsclients etc.) are capable of handling them,
you will not be able to read your own texts when you mail or post them.


[...]
Moreover, your newsreader has lost these characters completely at least
when you incorporated the quote in your response.

Now why should the characters have been completely lost?
I consider that a major flaw; at least give another
rendering. At least indicate that there is a character
there. I often see characters which I can tell are
definitely not what they look like on the screen, as that
is nonsense.

Your newsclient was not able to understand the header entries:

| Mime-Version: 1.0
| Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2
| Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

So when it found

J i . . v i s i t e d W . r z b u r g
4a 69 f8 ed 20 76 69 73 69 74 65 64 20 57 fc 72 7a 62 75 72 67
______^^^^^_______________________________^^_______________________

it completely missed the bytes above 7f.

Your message contains

J i v i s i t e d W r z b u r g
4a 69 20 76 69 73 69 74 65 64 20 57 72 7a 62 75 72 67

As you observed, it is not a matter of rendering at all.

Your software is just not capable of handling anything outside 7bit ASCII.

And your are trying to sell me binary text format for easier communication?

We surely have a long way to go ...

Marc
.

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