Colored indexes would make them distinguishable from notational subscripts used only for naming purposes. Dark blue for indexes, black for any and all subscripts.

If an index has a subscript in its name, make the subscript black just the same.

Wrote

Colored indexes would make them distinguishable from notational subscripts used only for naming purposes. Dark blue for indexes, black for any and all subscripts.

If an index has a subscript in its name, make the subscript black just the same.

Great idea! The index colour could follow the "rainbow rule" of the graphs (blue,red,etc...) for nested indices, so a subscript of an index could have simply the same color of the index....


best regards,

w3b5urf3r

I like this idea

Different colors for units are already quite useful. Different colors for indexes would give us the possibility to relax a bit from a "never ending story" of explaining the difference to our students between the notational subscript and index.

Regards,
Radovan

Colouring the indices may really help a lot. But how about handling the difference just as in printed math stuff? There are very simple rules:

• everything that can change (variable names including indices) is typeset in italic,
  
• everyting that does not change (text subscripts, function names, i, e, pi, operators including differential d, units of measurement) is typeset in roman (upright)

However, for numeric constants that would not work, as they are always printed in roman.

Perhaps best would be to make this an optional choice in the GUI (smath legacy, coloured indices or formal math), where the latter two easily could be combined.

If we are diving into typesetting then I also would recommend to mark vectors and matrices using bold typeface. That would require some matrix tag in the variable name, much like the ' for units. And that would enable the symbolic engine to apply the correct algebra rules for matrices and vectors.