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From: ne201ph@prism.gatech.EDU (Halvorson,Peter J)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Help on LaTeX hacking.
Message-ID: <20428@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: 26 Jan 91 18:56:46 GMT
References: <20376@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 42

In article <20376@hydra.gatech.EDU> I write:
>I hope someone can help me with this problem.
>
>I'm writing a technical paper and make frequent reference to leidenfrost
>temperature.  I have abbreviated this with:
>
>\newcommand{\tleid}{$ T_{Leid}$}
>
>Now I can just put \tleid in normal text.  The first problem is that this 
>will ignore a normal space after \tleid.  If I put a hard space in the 
>definition, it wouldn't work if followed by a punctuation mark.  The second
>problem is that I would like to be able to use the same command if I'm
>already in the math mode ( although I could live with \tleidm or something
>similar).
>
>Is the answer obvious to anyone?
>
>Thanks
>

The answer was obvious to at least 5 people so far,

raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen),
guy@phy.duke.edu (Guy Metcalfe),
Kresten Krab Thorup <krab@iesd.auc.dk>,
Laszlo C. Balint <lba@kolvi.hut.fi>,
and allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR).

TeX will not treat a command as an ordinary word, I can stick {} after each
use, or a \ if I really want a space after.  I can write it to detect math
mode like this:

\newcommand{\tleid}{\ifmmode T_{Leid}\else$ T_{Leid}$\fi}

Thanks.


-- 
              Peter Halvorson   --    Nuclear Engineering Program
          Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
    uucp:    ...!{allegra,amd,hplabs,ut-ngp}!gatech!prism!ne201ph
Internet: ne201ph@prism.gatech.edu  --   peter@fission.gatech.edu