On Wednesday 20 January 2010 10:10:07 Hans Hagen wrote:
in principle we can even drop $ and & as we now have primitives for them
Can you explain? I ignore the primatives for $E=mc^2$. Whereas Mojca regrets $$ $$, I have long prefered \startformula\stopformula (or \begin{equation}\end{equation} if you like, as I sometimes still need to use LaTeX). I also much prefer \framed {\relax no leading space} to \framed {% no leading space} yet I do think that it would be a very bad idea to drop % As to ugly source, I do agree that ``'' is not as pretty as “” (or is it ‟”, I never know) Character: “ U+201C Name: LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK Annotations and Cross References Alias names: double turned comma quotation mark Notes: this is the preferred character (as opposed to ‟ U+201F DOUBLE HIGH- REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK) See also: " U+0022 QUOTATION MARK ❝ U+275D HEAVY DOUBLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT 〝 U+301D REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK General Character Properties Block: General Punctuation Unicode category: Punctuation, Initial Quote Various Useful Representations UTF-8: 0xE2 0x80 0x9C UTF-16: 0x201C C octal escaped UTF-8: \342\200\234 XML decimal entity: “ Character: ‟ U+201F Name: DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK Annotations and Cross References Alias names: double reversed comma quotation mark Notes: has same semantic as “ U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK, but differs in appearance General Character Properties Block: General Punctuation Unicode category: Punctuation, Initial Quote Various Useful Representations UTF-8: 0xE2 0x80 0x9F UTF-16: 0x201F C octal escaped UTF-8: \342\200\237 XML decimal entity: ‟ Furthermore, some "editors" such as MS-Word break the source, substituting RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (Character: ’ U+2019) for APOSTROPHE (Character: ' U+0027) for some insane reason cited as the preferred character to be used for apostrophe. All of this is to stress that, whatever the new functionality added to ConTeXt, the traditional TeX shorthands remain *very* useful for lots of users and I suggest that they be retained. I'm not sure that I understand the problem with ` (GRAVE ACCENT) that cannot be solved with a macro or by a setting that disactivates the production of ‘ (LEFT SINGLE QUOTE MARK). I see from LaTeX that: \`{} is a grave accent works, as does: \`\ is a grave accent but not: {\`} is a grave accent or: \` is a grave accent Alan