# [NTG-context] Generalized \installcompoundcharacter

Matija Pretnar ntg-context@ntg.nl
Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:17:02 +0200

With the advent of UTF-8, there comes a great possibility to improve
readability of the TeX code.
For example: instead of \int_a^b, you could write S_a^b, where S is the
character for integral. Or greek letters and any other math symbol
imaginable.
I tried using \installcompoundcharacter S {\int} and similar commands
and all the characters show up nicely, but the spacing is all wrong,
because they are interpreted as variables instead of operations,
relations, ...
I think this replacement would be easy to implement (if it isn't
already implemented), because with math symbols, you don't have to
worry about hyphenation. You could simply replace the characters with
corresponding command before sending it to TeX. I already made some
kind of python script that does that, but for each file separately. And
with many files, you have to preprocess each one individually, which
sums up to another shell script and many temporary files.

Cheers, Matija