Nicer latex output for strings using \text

[nthiery]

The current latex output for simple strings is a bit overkill:

    sage: latex("hello world")
    \verb|hello|\phantom{\verb!x!}\verb|world|

There is a rationale behind it: namely this allows for a nicer rendering of multi-line ascii art by emulating a fixed-width font. However, for a simple one line string, the following would be more readable:

    sage: latex("hello world")
    \text{hello world}

The attached preliminary patch does this. However more work would need to be done, as this requires changing quite a few doctests. In fact some code seem to assume that the output use \verb before stripping this away, so maybe some cleanup is in order there.

I for myself won't work any further on this patch; feel free to take over!

[novoselt]

And what if several such strings will be output in sequence and fixed width font will somehow matter to them? Plus if something may be a single string or several, it means that the output format will change. I think that the best way for strings is uniform handling of all cases and verb seems like a sensible choice. If a particular application requires different treatment, it is better to insert appropriate latex code there.

[novoselt]

With #14382:

sage: latex("hello world")
\text{\tt hello{ }world}

Will this be better than verb? Middle { } are for dealing with multiple spaces, I guess we can avoid inserting them for a single space, but it will complicate the code...

[novoselt]

Nicolas - can we close this?

[slelievre]

Suggest to close this as duplicate, as it has long been solved.

[gh-DaveWitteMorris]

Yes, we can close this as a duplicate of #14382 (merged in 5.12.beta3).

[slelievre]

Thanks for tracking down which ticket solved this and providing a link!