Math upright Latin and Greek styles

[Hans Åberg]

> On 16 May 2016, at 00:05, Murray Sargent <murrays at exchange.microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> Hans Åberg mentioned "Changing Basic Latin and Greek to upright does not seem practical, due to legacy and lack of efficient input methods."
> 
> Have to say that it's really easy for the user to switch between math upright, italic, bold, and bold italic letters in Microsoft Word by just using the usual hot keys as discussed in 
> 
> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2007/05/30/using-math-italic-and-bold-in-word-2007/. 
> 
> This capability has been shipping for over 10 years now. But admittedly implementing such input functionality is a little tricky since the alphanumerics need to be converted to the desired Unicode Math Alphanumerics.

I am not familiar with the product, so it unclear to me whether it it produces a UTF-8 text file with the correct Unicode code points, as is a requirement for the LuaTeX engine that ConTeXt defaults to. One can design a new key map on OS X that selects the correct Unicode code points, but that is a huge task, given the large number of math symbols.

The legacy issue is that there are already loads of TeX code that translates the Basic Latin into Unicode math italic style. So it is hard to break the habit, and old code cannot readily be reused.

And one can ignore the problem altogether, and use the traditional TeX backslash “\…” commands, but using Unicode helps the readability of the source code. This is even more so in the case of theorem proof assistants.