greek math gets output as operator not identifier

[jgm]

greek math gets output as operator not identifier

[jgm]

This is a bit tricky, though. Some Greek letters, particularly
capitals, are used as operators, right? And there's no way to tell
from the TeX which it is.

Should we treat all lowercase Greek letters as mi, and uppercase
as mo? Or would it be better to make them all mi?

+++ rwst [Nov 08 11 08:59 ]:

The input in pandoc markdown

text $a+\alpha$

when fed to the command

pandoc -f markdown t --mathml -o t.xml

results in

<p>text <math display="inline" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mi>a</mi><mo>+</mo><mo>&#945;</mo></mrow></math></p>

i.e., the alpha is presented as operator while the MathML 3.0 spec says in 3.2.3.3:

The names of symbolic constants should be represented as mi elements:

<mi> &#x3C0;<!--GREEK SMALL LETTER PI--> </mi>
<mi> &#x2148;<!--DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL I--> </mi>
<mi> &#x2147;<!--DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL E--> </mi>

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#2

[rwst]

There IS a way to tell from LaTeX either 1) if a char is used as math operator;
and 2) if a greek char is intended to be written upright. The default is

1. always NO; 2) always NO for lowercase and YES for those uppercase
   chars that are different from Latin -- see the book Math Mode by Voß.

This canonical text also recommends using

1. \mathop or the AMSTeX macro \DeclareMathOperator; and 2) the upgreek package
   for upright lowercase greek and \mathit for italic uppercase greek.

This issue was about default behaviour which should now be identical to LaTeX.