Re: [NTG-context] Math literal colon

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, Hans Aberg wrote:

...

On 20 Jul 2015, at 16:40, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, Hans Aberg wrote:

...

The LaTeX package unicode-math has an option colon=literal, which makes it behave as in math functions (as in example below). Has ConTeXt a similar option?

No. You have to use \colon.

It would be nice with such an option, as it helps the readability of the input files.

There are two uses of colon in math, as a relation (in sets \{ x : f(x) = 0 \} and in ratios A:B, etc) and as a punctuation ($f \colon A -> B, etc.[1]). Only one of them can be mapped to the literal :, the other must use a macro name. Knuth chose to map : to the relation and mapped \colon to a punctuation and every other macro package follows that convention. It is easy to change the mapping, but if the mapping is reversed, is there is standard name for : as a relation? Aditya [1]: Amsmath redefines \colon so that the spacing is different from math punctuation. So, that is what you see in most published papers.