How to make fonts bigger in **plain tex** math mode?

[Jim Diamond]

On Thu, May  4, 2023 at 20:21 (+0100), Philip Taylor (Hellenic Institute) wrote:

> On 04/05/2023 20:14, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>> If Mailman is the cuplrit then everybody should get the same result.

> I believe that Jim Diamond has already identified the real cause of the
> problem — a ¿bug/feature? in the Thunderbird code which causes two or
> more real spaces to be replaced by n-1 non-breaking spaces followed by a
> real space when sending in HTML format; unfortunately I can't locate
> Jim's original report of this as I write, but as Jim is contributing to
> the thread I am sure that he will be able to fill in the missing details
> ...

Hi all,

[[ A little while ago I sent a message to the mailing list that doesn't seem
to have shown up (yet, anyway).  In case it never shows up, here is
something for those of you I am emailing directly. ]]

When trying to figure out what was going on with Phil's mail, I found the
following:

In https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290565 someone says
       	"over at bug 218277 comment 19, david made the point numerous times
       	that that «When using the HTML editor, hitting the space bar
        multiple times turns spaces into  ."

Perhaps Seamonkey (which is Phil's mail program, IIRC) also has this
(arguably) annoying behavior.  I suppose that due to HTML calling for
multiple spaces to be "compressed" into one space (am I right about that?),
automagically converting a string of N spaces into N-1 non-breakable spaces
followed by a real space is arguably as The Right Thing To Do in certain
circumstances.  Why HTML was (presumably) designed that way in the first
place is a bit of a mystery to me.

My wife uses Thunderbird (and probably has not customized it much).  I got
her to send me an email with two consecutive spaces, and Thunderbird
"helpfully" (*cough*) converted the first space into a non-breakable space.

I don't know if Thunderbird has the same evil behaviour when pasting text
into a message, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't.

So I guess the bottom line is that helpfully responding to someone's
request by typing code directly into an email is fraught with "danger",
because you never know when you might be overcome by the irresistible urge
to type two or more consecutive spaces.  At least if you are using
Thunderbird or other mail programs that behave similarly.

Has this horse been sufficiently flogged?

                                Jim