search

olsak / tex-nutshell

TeX in a Nutshell -- A short document about TeX principles
4 stars 2 forks source link

mathcode is missing #2

Open cao- opened 1 year ago

cao- commented 1 year ago

I use this document as a reference while reading the documentation of OpTeX, and I noticed that here the \mathcode primitive is not explained. Maybe it should appear somewhere, what do you think?

olsak commented 1 year ago

TeX in a Nutshell isn't good reference for "math issues" in TeX. It reads:

The math typesetting algorithms were implemented in TeX by its author with great care. All typographical traditions of math typesetting were taken into account. There are three chapters about math typesetting in his TeXbook. Moreover, there is the detailed appendix G containing the exact specification of generating math formulae. This topic is unfortunately out of the scope of this short text.

or:

... If it gets a \mathchardef-ed control sequence, it prints a math object (it works only in math mode, not documented here).

More than only a single paragraph should be added in order to describe the math settings using \matcode, \mathchardef, \Umathcode, \Umathchardef and friends. I'll think about it.

cao- commented 1 year ago

Thank you for the reply. I didn't know that math issues are intentionally not covered in "TeX in a Nutshell". Well, then there's no problem :)

olsak commented 1 year ago

I tried to add the sections about math codes, because I know that this wasn't documented in tex-nutshel nor in optex-math. Thank you for this tip. Done in my last commit https://github.com/olsak/tex-nutshell/commit/f3dbcd91eecb50a13fb2ab30b335dc68b2b96f05.