Will two-letter font style commands (\bf , \it , …) ever be resurrected in LaTeX?

Question

I understand that \bf and \it are now obsolete in LaTeX and that \textbf and \textit are proper, as they produce more sophisticated (in particular, cumulative and properly kerned) changes to font style. I have read the English version of "Obsolete commands and packages", v. 1.8.5.7 of l2tabu, Sec. 2.1 and I understand the rules and their reasons, as well as the several other commands that are affected.

However, I find it convenient to use LaTeX for notetaking during lectures, and in that rushed environment, shortening a command by any number of keystrokes helps keep me from falling behind. \bf and its two-letter kin are still very useful to me for that reason, and once a presentation is finished I can go through and replace all appearances of \bf et al. with \textbf et al.

My question is this: is there a plan eventually to replace the short font style commands like \bf with the implementations of \textbf etc. some day, or should I expect \bf always to remain in existence but obsolete, for reasons of backward compatibility with original TeX? Original TeX has been greatly improved on in countless ways, but in the heat of transcription I sometimes miss its conciseness.

Answer 1

The simple answer is no, because the new font commands work better for the reasons in the links you cite.

The best way to reduce your typing to customize your editor. In my editor (TeXShop on a Mac) I have the command \textbf{} bound to Command-B, and \emph{} to Command-I. (I generally don't use textit{}) This makes it simple to use the "new" font commands in my source but with drastically reduced typing.

Most editors should be able to do this sort of shortcut.

Answer 2

EDIT2: There is now a markdown package, which can be used with the LuaTeX engine.

Following on the markdown idea mentionned in comments by @Emre, it can be coded in LaTeX. For instance, the code below gets *italics* and **bold** to work (with nesting as well).

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\newcommand{\star@out}{%
  \star@ifnext{\bgroup\bfseries\let\star@current\star@inbf\@gobble}%
              {\bgroup\itshape\let\star@current\star@init}}
\newcommand{\star@inbf}{%
  \star@ifnext{\egroup\@gobble}{\bgroup\itshape\let\star@current\star@initbf}}
\newcommand{\star@init}{%
  \star@ifnext{\bgroup\bfseries\let\star@current\star@initbf}{\egroup}}
\newcommand{\star@initbf}{\star@ifnext{\egroup\@gobble}{\egroup}}
\let\star@current\star@out
\newcommand{\star@ifnext}[2]{%
  \def \reserved@a {#1}%
  \def \reserved@b {#2}%
  \futurelet @let@token \star@ifnext@aux 
}
\begingroup
\catcode`*=13
@firstofone{\endgroup
  \newcommand{}{\star@current}
  \newcommand{\star@ifnext@aux}{%
    \ifx @let@token \let \reserved@c \reserved@a 
    \else             \let \reserved@c \reserved@b 
    \fi 
    \reserved@c
  }
}
\makeatother
\AtBeginDocument{\catcode`*=13}
\begin{document}
Hello, this is a test, to see whether it works.
\end{document}

EDIT as per Hendrik Vogt's suggestion. The construction

\begingroup
\catcode`\*=13
\@firstofone{\endgroup ... }

ensures that every * within the argument of \@firstofone has catcode 13. Namely, a group is started, in which * are active, then \@firstofone does nothing but forces TeX to read its argument, converting characters of the input file to tokens (with catcode fixed, except if someone later uses \scantokens), and the group then ends with \endgroup. The catcode of * is restored, which means that any * which is read later (i.e., not those in the argument of \@firstofone) will be of catcode 12 (other). The advantage of this construction over doing \catcode`=13 before and \catcode`=12 after is that the catcode of * keeps whichever value it had, even if it wasn't 12.

Answer 3

To expand on Alan's good answer (and to reiterate his ‘no’) there's another big reason that \bf and \it are not recommended now: they are short and easy to type, but they do not have semantics. LaTeX attempts to separate content and formatting in its markup, and these font changing commands break such ideals.

In the rough, commands to type often as part of your document should be short and meaningful; commands to define formatting decisions should be long and descriptive.

Answer 4

Following the answer of Bruno, the wiki package allow a very simplified entry of boldface and italics fonts using the Wikipedia syntax:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{wiki}
\begin{document}
\wikimarkup
Write in '''bold''', ''italic'' or '''''both'''''.
\end{document}

Bold and italics can be nested and even overlapped, so that you can obtain the eqivalent to \textit{inter\textbf{sec}}\textbf{tion} with ''inter'''sec''tion'''.

Answer 5

First, regarding the use of the PlainTeX-based font switching commands \rm, \sf, \tt, etc in a LaTeX document: Even though the LaTeX2e kernel does not define these commands, they are in fact still available if you use one of the "standard" document classes -- article, report, and book -- or a document class that's based on these three classes. For more on how \rm, \sf, etc are implemented in the article, report, and book classes see, e.g., this answer to the posting Is there any reason not to use \let to redefine a deprecated control sequence to the currently recommended one?

Second, here's a solution that uses LuaLaTeX to convert some simple markdown-type text formatting "instructions" into LaTeX code. Specifically, text inside matched pairs of ***, **, and * characters in a line of input is rendered in bold-italics, bold, and italics, respectively.

The operation of the Lua function that does the main work can be initiated and terminated via two LaTeX macros named \MarkdownOn and \MarkdownOff. The Lua function doesn't operate on material contained in verbatim-like environments.

\documentclass{article}

%% Lua-side code
\usepackage{luacode}
\begin{luacode}
in_verbatim = false
function markdown ( line ) 
-- don't operate on input if we're in a verbabim-type environment
if string.find ( line , "\\begin{[vV]erbatim}" ) then
  in_verbatim = true
elseif string.find ( line , "\\end{[vV]erbatim}" ) then
  in_verbatim = false
elseif in_verbatim == false then
  line = string.gsub ( line, "%*%*%*(.-)%*%*%*" , "\\textbf{\\textit{%1}}")
  line = string.gsub ( line, "%*%*(.-)%*%*" ,     "\\textbf{%1}")
  line = string.gsub ( line, "%*(.-)%*" ,         "\\textit{%1}" )
end
return line
end
\end{luacode}

%% TeX-side code
\newcommand\MarkdownOn{\directlua{luatexbase.add_to_callback( 
   "process_input_buffer", markdown, "markdown" )}}
\newcommand\MarkdownOff{\directlua{luatexbase.remove_from_callback( 
   "process_input_buffer", "markdown" )}}

\setlength\parindent{0pt} % just for this example

\begin{document}
\MarkdownOn
Lua function \texttt{markdown} turned on:

*italic*, **bold**, ***bold italic***

\bigskip
A line inside a \texttt{verbatim} environment:

\begin{verbatim}
*italic*, **bold**, ***bold italic***
\end{verbatim}

\bigskip
\MarkdownOff
Lua function \texttt{markdown} turned off:

*italic*, **bold**, ***bold italic***
\end{document}

Answer 6

I had the same problem recently:

scrartcl Error: undefined old font command `\bf'.

After some investigations, I found this on the tug.org web site:

\makeatletter
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\rm}{\normalfont\rmfamily}{\mathrm}
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\sf}{\normalfont\sffamily}{\mathsf}
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\tt}{\normalfont\ttfamily}{\mathtt}
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\bf}{\normalfont\bfseries}{\mathbf}
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\it}{\normalfont\itshape}{\mathit}
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\sl}{\normalfont\slshape}{\@nomath\sl}
\DeclareOldFontCommand{\sc}{\normalfont\scshape}{\@nomath\sc}
\makeatother

It allows to recover all "old" TeX commands we all like...