Compound superscripts do not work

[Graeme.Ambler@…]

It is not possible (as far as I can tell) to use compound superscripts of the
form {x^y}z. They just come out as x^{{yz}, which is not the desired effect at
all! Of course this is only a problem when variables with superscripts are
raised to a power... however this is not terribly unusual in real mathematics...}

[levon]

​http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

Of course it's possible, you just type ^{again, and there
you are. But since you didn't really give a useful bug report
(exact description of what you did, a minimal lyx file produced
from this, what frontend you were using, etc. etc.) it's impossible
to guess how you are trying to enter it.}

[Graeme.Ambler@…]

The report was actually quite specific, and you have misunderstood the problem
by not bothering to read it properly. However, since you seem to need walking
through this step by step...

Your method does not work. Typing "x^yz" in a formula gives the TeX x^{yz},
not {x^y}z. I could not find a way to get {x^y}z within lyx, no matter what I
tried. Importing some LaTeX containing \[ {x^y}z \] results in the lyx

\begin_inset Formula \[ {x^y}z\]
\end_inset

which at first you'd think was right (it even looks roughly correct in the lyx
window). However, when you do View->DVI you get the error message:

Double superscript.

x^{y}

{z}\]

I treat x^1^2' essentially like x^1{}2'.

and no DVI output, suggesting that it has actually translated it as x^{y}{z}
which, as LaTeX correctly spots, is not legal TeX.

[lasgouttes]

I am not sure that it will fix the whole bug, but there
will be a patch in 1.3.1 that makes sure that ${x^y}z$ is
read correctly by LyX.

[levon]

Indeed. Current CVS, everything works fine.

The other side of this report seems to be that Graeme is
unaware of using \{ (as in the sequence \{x^{y<right><right>}z )
but apparently his time is far more important than mine, so I
am supposed to guess. So I'll guess he wasn't.

[Graeme.Ambler@…]

Thankyou for your help. I was not aware of the \{ trick. I did actually spend
quite a lot of time reading the documentation to try to find out how to do this
and only submitted the bug report when I had failed to find a way. There is a
lot of documentation, so I guess I must have missed it.

Thankyou once again.

[levon]

It's quite likely it's undocumented. The user docs are *very*
behind the times, unfortunately :(

[levon]

FYI, I am documenting this in the user guide right now.