Some thoughts on a ground-up remake of LaTeX

[William F Hammond]

David Carlisle, responding to Don Hosek, writes in part:

> lots of people actually.
>
> with a standard UK keyboard for example, it's much easier to
> type \’a and --- than á and — 

With GELLMU I wanted to insist on strict syntax for
arguments of commands, i.e., an argument of a command must
be enclosed in braces and must follow the command name
without whitespace.  Also the name of a command must be
alphanumeric so that it can be the name of an XML element.
In advanced mode with maximal LaTeX resemblance TeX's \'
becomes \acute{}.  Thus, in input a-acute may be entered as
\acute{a} (also as direct Unicode or as "á".

However, GELLMU offers a few meta-commands, one of which is
\macro. With \macro{\'a}{\acute{a}} in the preamble, one may
use \'a in the body.

The GELLMU manual suggests that the use of \macro is
dangerous.  Any use of the string "\'a" in the input,
regardless of context, is converted.  Normal shortcuts in
GELLMU input should be done with \newcommand.

                              -- Bill

Email: hmwlfsr at yahoo.com
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