Personally, I just don't use the ' in LyX at all, especially as it doesn't
display correctly, and as you show, doesn't combine properly with other
superscripts/subscripts.
Instead, I always do ^\prime which looks much nicer, and lets you control
things better.
So perhaps the code would work better if it just made ' autocorrect to
^\prime ?
(In fact I've defined my own \pri command which alters the LaTeX height of the
\prime to one I like more; and ones that use the unicode-math multi-prime
commands \dprime, \tprime, and \qprime).
— Isaac Oscar Gariano
________________________________
From: lyx-devel <lyx-devel-boun...@lists.lyx.org> on behalf of Andrew Parsloe
<ajpars...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, 27 November 2023 10:10 AM
To: LyX Developers <lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org>
Subject: Primes and superscripts in mathed
TeX accepts S'^{2} (between $ delimiters) as a valid construction (TeXbook,
p.130, line above Ex. 16.5) but mathed in LyX converts this to S'{}^{2}. In
this simple case that is not a problem (in fact the interpolated {} gives
better spacing) but it becomes a problem with expressions like (real-life
example)
S'^{\,-1}_{0i} or S_{0i}'^{\,-1}
These compile fine in TeX and display as desired but mathed turns them into
S'{}_{0i}^{\,-1} and S_{0i}'{}^{\,-1}
which give very different and clearly wrong results in the pdf.
The combination of a prime followed by a superscript seems a sufficiently basic
sequence to me that I think mathed should handle it with more finesse than
immediately and always inserting an empty brace pair between ' and ^.
[[Speculation: I don't know the code but perhaps the problem is that mathed
insists on subscript preceding superscript when both are involved in a symbol?
R^{ij}_{kl} in mathed becomes R_{kl}^{ij}, and inserting a prime as in
R'_{kl}^{ij} then produces the double superscript error. In contrast,
R_{kl}'^{ij} does not. TeX accepts the '^ combination and I think mathed should
do so too.]]
Andrew
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