"John Hunter" <jdh2358@...149...> writes:
I'm on the fence as to how to handle this case. The majority of our
users will think of $ as the US currency symbol, and will have never
heard of TeX.
Those users are probably also not so likely to want to use mathtext, so
there could be an rc setting for toggling the meaning of $ between the
currency symbol and the math delimiter. Adding rc settings is probably
not good for the API, though.
Is it an option to use something rarer than $ to delimit formulas? Most
of the printable ASCII characters are probably being used by someone,
and the unprintable characters are likely to be difficult to handle. ISO
Latin 1 contains e.g. the little-used currency sign �. But perhaps it is
too difficult to type on US keyboards?
(There is a Unicode Technical Note at UTN #28: Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics
which suggests using U+23A8 LEFT CURLY BRACKET MIDDLE PIECE and U+23AC
RIGHT CURLY BRACKET MIDDLE PIECE as math delimiters, but it also has its
own Unicode-based math syntax.)
Option 1 is to educate them, and require them to \$ quote that symbol.
I guess Option 1' is to move away from $ to something else, and educate
mathtext users. If there are fewer of them (us), this would seem to be
easier globally.
I'm not too keen on the text(x, y, Math('string')) proposal, which is
a little outside the normal matplotlib approach.
You're right that it would be quite different than the rest of the API.
Perhaps your Option 2 (a text property) would cause the least surprise
in the long run, although it would break current mathtext-using code.
···
--
Jouni K. Sepp�nen