[texhax] Forcing size changes in exponents

Axel E. Retif axel.retif at mac.com
Mon Aug 17 09:57:09 CEST 2015


On 08/16/2015 08:03 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> On 2015-08-17 at 00:28:06 +0200, Martin Schröder wrote:
>
>   > 2015-08-17 0:09 GMT+02:00 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:
>   > > Actually disabling \rm et al. would be such a major break in
>   > > compatibility that I sincerely hope, and expect, it will never happen.

[...]

> No reasonable book about LaTeX mentions \rm, \it, etc.  Why are people
> still using these macros?  Do plain TeX users believe that LaTeX is
> just an extension of plain TeX?

I work with other people's texts to set them for publication. Always the 
first thing I do is to change all \'{a}, \~{n}, etc., to á, ñ, etc. 
(with UTF-8 as encoding), and \sc to \textsc{...}, etc. Harder is \rm 
because sometimes is \upshape, or \emph{...} within an emph-italicized 
environment, or mathrm...; and the same for \bf (\textbf, \mathbf...).

But they don't use \rm, \bf, etc., because they are rebel or defiant 
users or plainTeX users trying to impose their ways on LaTeX. They think 
that *is* LaTeX.

Maybe they learned LaTeX 2.09 first and then just adopted the essentials 
to LaTeX2e, or maybe they learned LaTeX from an old LaTeX 2.09 user...

In /usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base the article, book, 
report, etc., classes have

     \DeclareOldFontCommand{\rm}{\normalfont\rmfamily}{\mathrm}

There, also, the testpage.tex (an old document, true) has

     The ticks of the left and top rulers are $1 {\rm mm}$ apart

But even more ---check the utf8ienc.dtx file in 
/usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/source/latex/base ; it has

     $t_{\rm C2}t_{\rm A3}$

Old habits die hard. I also hope \rm, \bf, etc., are not disabled.


Best

Axel







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