rchen@m.cs.uiuc.edu (06/13/90)
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