plus minus

Fred Kohlhepp wrote: Mr. Sheehan's latest blog on text formatting has me playing, first in Prime 3.0  (we haven't upgraded to 3.1 yet,)then in version 15.  I moved to 15 after I couldn't find an infix function operator in Prime.  You can do the same trick in 15 (without the double quotes.  I typed an a to start a math region, then "cntrl-shift-k" to tell Mathcad that what was coming was a special character, then "alt 0177" to type the ± character.  (That trick works in most places, including right here.)  Then "cntrl-shift-k" again to get Mathcad out of special character mode and parenthesis, x, and y.  Delete the a and you have    ±(x,y)     and you can proceed to define your function,  If Prime had an infix operator, you could do (like 15):

It's even better than you say, Fred.  If I just type ":" to start the definition, I just need to back arrow to the first place holder and then just type ctt-shft-k without having to add that extra a to start the expression.   The same goes for the infix operator, except that I type in the first value, then ctf-shft-k for the operator and so on.   If you enter the = evaluation operator from the toolbar, then you can directly enter a special name.   I only know because I was playing around with it the other day .... I can't remember what, but I did hit one circumstance where I had to place the cursor on the right hand side of the placeholder to get it to work.   On the other hand, that may have been due to the keyboard focus not being where I thought it was; I'm now using a laptop and trackpads and I don't seem to get on - my hands only have to get within a centimetre or so of a trackpad before the mouse starts jumping around.

Stuart