Formats

Page Contents

Formatting

HTML provides the possibility to format your text in a number of ways, such as italicizing, emboldening, writing as superscript or superscript etc. However it can be a bit of a chore writting all those tags, and the resulting source code is not particularly readable, so provides format modifiers to achieve this more succinctly.

modifier format example result
^ superscript 10^2
10^2
_ subscript x_1
x_1
~ italic ~y
~y
# bold #y
#y
@ cursive @A
@A
$ overline $x
$x

To achieve the formatting, the format modifier must come immediately before the character (no spaces).

                  
~x not ~ x
~x not ~ x

To format more than one character enclose the characters in brackets:   { and } .

~{xyz}
~{xyz}

Two or more format modifiers can be used together without brackets:

                  
~#v_~i
~#v_~i

This all means of course that the following characters have a special meaning in :

Reserved Characters

{ Used to open and close template parameter lists, and delimit the span of super-/sub- scripts, bold and italics (see below)
To display the characters  "{"  and  "}"  in your expressions use the symbols  "&lbrk."  and  "&rbrk." , or use the escape-sequence (back-slash), i.e.  "\{"  and  "\}"  .
}
^ (hat) The character immediately following will be displayed as a superscript. If more than one character is to be displayed use "{" and "}" to enclose them. E.g. "x^{2n}" will give x2n.
Note that even though there might only be one character displayed, if the Mathyma input is multi-character use brackets to enclose the string. For example write "x^{&beta.}" to get xβ
To display  "^"  in your expressions use the symbol  "&hat." , or  "\^"  .
_ (underscore) The character immediately following will be displayed as a subscript. Multiple characters should be enclosed in brackets, as for superscript.
To display  "_"  in your expressions use the symbol  "&uscore." , or  "\_"  .
~ (tilde) The character immediately following will be displayed as italic. Multiple characters should be enclosed in brackets, as for superscript.
To display  "~"  in your expressions use the symbol  "&tilde." , or  "\~"  .
# (hash) The character immediately following will be displayed as bold. Multiple characters should be enclosed in brackets, as for superscript.
To display  "#"  in your expressions use the symbol  "&hash." , or  "\#"  .
@ (at) The character immediately following will be displayed in cursive font. Multiple characters should be enclosed in brackets, as for superscript.
To display  "@"  in your expressions use the symbol  "&at." , or  "\@"  .
$ (dollar) The character immediately following will be overlined. Multiple characters should be enclosed in brackets, as for superscript.
To display  "$"  in your expressions use the symbol  "&dollar." , or  "\$"  .

Combinations of the above special characters do not need to be bracketed separately, For example you write   "~x^~n"   to get   xn,   (i.e. it is not necessary to write "~x^{~n}").   Similarly write   "#~{bold-italics}"   to get   bold-italics.

Brackets

As mentioned elsewhere, uses the "curly" brackets, "{" and "}" both to indicate that multiple characters are to be formatted, and to contain the arguments for a template

~x^{-1}
fract{~a,~b} 

In fact you can bracket any text in , in most cases this will not have any effect, for example

this is just a {piece} of ~{text}
this is just a {piece} of ~{text}

However there is one use of brackets which can be quite handy - and that is to prevent commas (and slashes in arrays and matrices) from being interpreted as argument separators. For example, suppose you want to get:

fract{{1,2},{3,4}}

If you just wrote

fract{1,2,3,4}

would consider "1" as the first parameter of the fract{} template and "2" as the second, and you would get:

fract{1,2,3,4}

To get round this, enclose the "inner" commas in brackets (either themselves, or the whole argument):

fract{1{,}2,3{,}4}      OR       fract{{1,2},{3,4}}

In this way recognizes that only the middle comma is at the right level to be an argument separator.