Numbers in \text{} get eaten unless in math mode

[rhinopotamus]

Let's say that you want to write a number greater than a thousand, and for clarity you want to put commas in it. One way you often do this in LaTeX is you say \text{236,000}. Unfortunately these numbers get eaten in the pretext conversion unless they are in math mode.

For instance, in a .tex file I have:

\item Scientists are concerned that if the September sea-ice falls between \text{200,000} and \text{500,000} square miles, ...

And this gets rendered into .ptx as:

<li><p>Scientists are concerned that if the September sea-ice falls between and square miles, ...

Works correctly in math mode, though:

$$D=\text{236,000}-\text{56,000} \ast 1.004^M$$

renders correctly as

<me>D=\text{236,000}-\text{56,000} \ast 1.004^M</me>

Don't know why this doesn't work right in plain text. My guess: both InlineMath(s) and DisplayMath(s) send s through escape, but Para(s) doesn't. But then I don't know that you want to escape things inside a generic paragraph.

It's possible that the right solution is to tell my coauthor that it's weird to write numbers in \text{} outside of math mode ;), but I thought I'd raise this to at least remind myself to think more about it later.