[tex4ht] superscript with tex4ht

[Michal Hoftich]

Dear Alex,


> When I have `\textsuperscript{r}` in my document, tex4ht produces output
> that elevates the "r" not by using Word's "superscript" feature (Format >
> Font... > Effects > Superscript). Instead it seems to decrease the font size
> manually (from 12pt to 9.5pt) and elevate it some other way. (Example input
> and output attached.) The result is unfortunate, because this elevated "r"
> disrupts the document's overall line spacing. I am also concerned that the
> publisher's software won't know what to do with it, so that it will continue
> to look bad.
>

I think this issue is on Word's side. tex4ht creates text styled with
style:text-position="super 80\%" property. LibreOffice can display it
correctly. I also compared code created by LibreOffice when I created
a superscript manually and it seems that the only difference is that
it uses "super 58%" as a value for text-position property. When I
tried to change the tex4ht style to use this value, Word could open it
as well. So it seems that Word has some hard-coded rules that
superscript is only text with "super 58%" text-position.

Anyway, I don't think that 80% which tex4ht uses has any deep meaning,
so we can use 58% instead. I also found that there was missing for
\textsubscript, which is now part of LaTeX core, so I added the
support for it to both ooffice and HTML formats.

You can use the following config file until the update gets to TeX Live:

\Preamble{xhtml}
\Configure{textsuperscript}
  {\HCode{<text:span text:style-name="textsuperscript">}}
  {\HCode{</text:span>}}
\OOstyles{%
<style:style style:name="textsuperscript" style:family="text">\Hnewline
   <style:text-properties style:text-position="super 58\%"/>\Hnewline
</style:style>\Hnewline
}
\begin{document}
\EndPreamble


Best regards,
Michal