Henry Spencer wrote on 2000-08-09 04:30 UTC:
> On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> > I disagree. Mathematical typesetting for instance will make very
> > intensive use of Plane 1 characters, and it is essential to treat them
> > as first-class citizens. What you write in TeX today as $v$ will
> > tomorrow be MATH ITALIC LATIN LOWERCASE LETTER V in Plane 1.
>
> All I can say is that I hope this proposal gets shot down on the way to
> becoming a standard. If there's one thing we don't need, it's a dozen
> more "v" glyphs disguised as characters, *ESPECIALLY* outside Plane 0. We
> should treat these not as first-class citizens, but as abominations.
It was my understanding, that this has already been approved by both UTC
and ISO/IEC and that people in industry (especially from big
mathematical textbook/journal publishers such as Springer) are *very*
eager to see this implemented. I have some mixed feelings about this
myself:
- It admittedly stretches the original separation between character and
presentation style quite a bit.
- It will make the difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16 a widely significant
issue.
+ Mathematicians really do think of U+004E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N and
U+2115 DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL N as different characters, just as we think
of LATIN A and GREEK ALPHA of different characters, in other words, for
a mathematician a change in font style can convey far more information
than a change in script (say Latin versus Greek). I don't care much
whether I have to use a B or BETA in my formulae, but as soon as I write
it in bold, it will be a vector, and that is for me critical plain-text
information that better should not be delegated to a higher-level markup
mechanism. There is really a different level of significance involved than
bold/italics/underlining in normal English text.
+ It is actually quite neat and very convenient for AltaVista-style full-text
searches over mathematical texts to have different character codes
for the English word "a" and for the variable "a" in "F = m�a".
+ It makes the coding of mathematical formulae significantly simpler and
compacter, because otherwise you would have to change the font style
in a formula almost after every character (operators are not in italic),
which becomes *very* tedious. With the STX proposal implemented, all that
mathematical markup has to do is to provides means for non-linear
recursive arrangements of characters (subscript, superscript, fractions,
roots, matrices, large delimiters). In contrast to TeX, the style
selection, spacing, and combining accents needed for mathematical
typesetting will be part of the plaintext with Unicode, not something
provided by the markup mechanism separately.
http://www.ams.org/STIX/
http://www.ams.org/STIX/glyphs/proposal/newsub/utc/99195-rev1.htm
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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