> In mathed's text mode you mean?
Yes.
> The \alpha in textmode is black, isn't it? The simplest way would to tell
> people 'real alphas are blue'.
Yes. I told them the trick.
> How should the warning message look like? I don't think a full blown
> message box is in order,
It is not a very bad idea. A big message box will be intrusive (and
scary) but users will learn very quickly how to avoid it.
> so best I could offer is a patch to write that
> message into the status line which will get overwritten soon.
Yes, it will be overwritten. And, the status line is at the bottom of
the screen so even if the text is in red, no one will notice it.
> Another option would be to use
> \let\oldalpha\alpha \def\alpha{\ensuremath{\oldalpha}}
no. This does not sound like a good idea. We will have to add 700 such
things in the preamble.
> I am still a bit reluctant to hard code this check, not only because any
> such check will fail in some situations
Under those rare situations, users know what they are doing and will not
complain.
> but also because I won't go through all 700 supported symbols and
> figure out which ones are safe to use in text and which ones are not.
As I said, the warning message does not have to be fired for ALL
symbols. Just all Greek letters and less than 20 \le \sum, \frac etc. I
am a statistician and I believe this will cover 99% of the cases.
--
Bo Peng
