mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 04:44:44PM +0200, Jan Lellmann wrote:
> I noticed that recent versions of Texmacs exhibit a strange
> behavior: When I type a comma "," in an equation followed by space,
> the comma disappears. This is quite annoying. Is it intended
> behavior, and if yes, why?

Yes, this is the intended behaviour.
The shortcut ", " stands for an invisible comma.
For instance, "a_i, j" allows you to type the matrix entry $a_{ij}$.

In math mode, users are not intended to manually enter spaces
around commas or other operators, except if you want to explicitly
apply a function. The typesetter knows about the amount of whitespace
to put around commas and operators. In other words, type "f(x,y)"
and not "f(x, y)"; also type "x+y", not "x + y".

I agree though that the behaviour may seem unnatural;
maybe I should only activate it in semantic editing mode.
On the other hand, it is true that spurious commas are
*THE* major nuisance to parsing math formulas.
It is really a nasty habit. An alternative would be
to simply ignore such spaces.

On this occasion, I would re-ask users to try the semantic
mathematical editing mode (see explantions in the documentation
on typing mathematical formulas); it remains useful to have
more feedback on this issue.

Best, --Joris