On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I have tried to compile an old document (written in mkii times). Among
other problems that I yet need to isolate, the following minimal
example doesn't want to compile: $\bigl| x \bigr>$ since <|> aren't
recognized as candidates for delimiters. There is a workaround of
course (using \langle, \rangle, ... instead of <>), but the three
characters are just way too handy to use.

| works fine here. < and > don't. I did not know that \left< is equivalent to \left\langle even in plain tex.

I suppose that the behaviour in mkii comes from these lines:

\definemathcharacter [<] [nothing] [sy] ["68] [ex] ["0A]
\definemathcharacter [>] [nothing] [sy] ["69] [ex] ["0B]

I guess mkii is imitating plain tex here. (Though, I could not find how this is happening in plain tex)

But I'm not sure where mkiv could be changed.

I don't know how to do this. < should behave like a rel without a \left, and like a delimited with \left.

I have tried to use
adobename="greater",
...
mathspec={
{ class="binary", name="gt" },
{ class="close", name="rbrace" },
},
but without any success.

rbrace!!. Probabably you want rangle. You can change the order of the two, and then > will map to rangle, but you will have to use \gt to get the relation symbol.

Aditya