Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Hans Åberg]

> On 10 Oct 2016, at 22:31, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode at inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-10-10, Hans Åberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
>> It is possible to write math just using ASCII and TeX, which was the original idea of TeX. Is that want you want for linguistics?
> 
> I don't see the need to do everything in plain text. Long ago, I spent
> a great deal of time getting my editor to do semi-wysiwyg TeX maths
> (work later incorporated into x-symbol), but actually it's a waste of
> time and I've given up. 

A fast input method is using text substitutions together with a Unicode capable editor generating UTF-8. Then use LuaTeX together with ConTeXt or LaTeX/unicode-math.

On MacOS, it works interactively: when a matching input string is detected, it is replaced. It does not take long time to design such a text substitutions set: I made one for all Unicode math letters, more than a thousand.