On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 6:15 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

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http://tug.org/pracjourn/2011-1/beccari.html

Short summary: This allows the comma in  $1, 2, 3$ to be have as punctuation comma (similar to \setupmathematics[autopunct=no]) and $1,23$ to behave as decimal comma (similar to \setupmatematics[autopunct=yes]). Since it is targeting pdftex and xetex engines, it makes , an active char in mathmode and redefines it as a macro that uses look ahead to check if the next token is a digit.

In principle a cleaner implementation is possible in luatex (without using active characters), but I am not completely sure about this. It will be better to handle this as part of \mnum macro.

Aditya Hm, can you explain this a bit ?

-- luigi

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In principle a cleaner implementation is possible in luatex (without using active characters), but I am not completely sure about this. It will be better to handle this as part of \mnum macro.

Hm, can you explain this a bit ?

Currently ConTeXt already checks if '.' is part of a complete number or not as part of the export macros. For example: \m{x + 1.25y = 3.5} exports as 𝑥+1.25𝑦=3.5 Notice that 1.25 is part of a single tag. In contrast, if you use comma as a math delimiter, then the export function does not recognize the number correctly. \m{x + 1,25y = 3.5} exports as 𝑥+1,25𝑦=3,5 However, we do have a \mn macro (math number) to tag numbers. So you can type \m{x + \mn{1,25}y = \mn{3,5}} which exports as 𝑥+1,25𝑦=3,5 So, if we want to recognize ',' as a decimal separator, two solutions are possible in MkIV. The first is to build upon the existing export code that recognizes '.' as a decimal separator (to figure out the contents of the <mn> tag) to also recognize ',' as a decimal separator; The drawback of such an approach is that if you are in the habit of not adding a space after a comma, for example writing "Let $\naturalnumbers$ denote the set $\{1,2,3,\dots\}$ of natural numbers..." then you will get wrong output. So, an alternative option is to ask the user to tag all numbers with \mn. Then, the \mn{...} macro can redefine the comma so that the spaces around it match its use as a decimal separator. Aditya