[tex-eplain] Problems with math symbols in pdftex outlines

[Karl Berry]

    It seems to work fine, except that in math symbols the dollar is
    shown as it is: `$'.  More in general, other TeX commands like
    accents are not expanded.

    How to work that out?  Isn't it possible to write TeX math symbols
    within pdftex outlines?

My understanding is that the PDF outlines are handled as "plain text" in
a system encoding, rather than being normally typeset.

I am not sure whether the encoding is specifiable in the document, if
it's always UTF-8, if it depends on the current locale, or what.  If you
or anyone feels like looking into this, I'd be glad to know more details.

If the encoding is Unicode, I guess it would be theoretically possible
to write straight-line math, except that virtually no fonts exist with
Unicode math support today.  And the spacing would likely be awful even
if the glyphs were there.

What I know for sure is that in Texinfo, we go to a lot of trouble to
make all commands turn into their "ASCII" equivalents for the outlines
window, as best we can.

Best,
Karl