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From: rchen@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: How to remap * in LaTeX (TeX)
Message-ID: <69100004@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 90 22:26:00 GMT
Lines: 30
Nf-ID: #N:m.cs.uiuc.edu:69100004:000:1390
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!rchen    Jun 12 17:26:00 1990


It might be a trivial question but for me it is pretty hard.
I started reading TeXbook three weeks ago, and I am writing
a manpage style file for our group.

The character "*" occurs frequently in C, C++ documentations, and 
I don't like to say $\ast$ or \* every time in a function declaration,
e.g., char$\ast$ or char\*.  Rather, I want to use "char*" in the
manpage directly as most other characters that I redefined, e.g.,
+, -, <,>,|,etc., so that the manpage manuscript looks clean and
readable even before being printed on a hard copy. 

The plain * in roman font is tuned for adding footnote, i.e.,
it is raised some what. It does not look nice in manpages.
Changing * to an active control sequence does not seem to work
because LaTeX has quite few functions ending with *.  They assume *
to be a plain character of catcode 12.  Redefining * mess up other
LaTeX functions, which is even worse.

The only solution I can think of right now is to map * to the same
font map that \ast has, but I couldn't find a way to do so.
Thanks very much for any help or pointers.

By the way, the manpage.sty that I wrote is almost done.  If anyone
interested, I'd be happy to give it out for comments.  But please
don't expect too much.  TeX (LaTeX) macro writing is much harder
than I expected.

-Ron Chen @ Department of Computer Science
            University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign