Built-Up Formula Heuristics
- Math characters identify themselves and neighbors as math
- E.g., fraction (U2044), ASCII operators, U2200–U22FF, and U20D0–U20FF identify neighbors as mathematical
- Math characters include various English and Greek alphabets
- When heuristics fail, user can select math mode: WYSIWYG instead of visible math on/off codes
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| Unicode plain-text encoded mathematical expressions can be used "as is" for simple documentation purposes. Use in more elegant documentation and in programming languages requires knowledge of the underlying mathematical structure. This section describes some of the heuristics that can distill the structure out of the plain text. |
Many mathematical expressions patently identify themselves as mathematical, obviating the need to declare them explicitly as such. One of TeX's greatest limitations is its inability to detect expressions that are obviously mathematical, but that are not enclosed within $'s. An advantage of recognizing mathematical expressions without math-on/math-off syntax is that it is much more tolerant to user errors involving $'s. Resyncing is automatic, while in TeX you have to start up again from the omission in question. This approach might also be useful in converting the mathematical literature that's not yet available in an object-oriented machine-readable form, into that form. The basic idea is that math characters identify themselves as such and potentially identify their neighbors as math characters as well. For example, the myriad Unicode math operator symbols and symbol combining marks (U+20D0 - U+20FF)
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