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.
That was precisely my reaction.
Markus Kuhn replied:
I have some mixed feelings about this myself:
+ Mathematicians really do think of U+004E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N and
U+2115 DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL N as different characters,
My point of view is different.
I am a mathematician, and hence am symbol-greedy.
If only a typewriter is available, that will do.
When I have seven fonts available, I use seven fonts, each with
its own meaning.
It is not true that there is a standard in mathematics
that associates fonts with meanings. At most there are
some rather common things in various subdisciplines.
... as soon as I write it in bold, it will be a vector
But I never use bold for my vectors, at most bold 1 for the vector
with all coordinates equal to 1.
It is true that font variations carry a meaning in mathematics,
but it is a meaning that is determined in each book separately.
One paper will use fraktur c for the cardinality of the continuum,
another paper will use italic c, while in a third paper a symbol
is given in fraktur if and only if it denotes a Lie algebra.
Since there is no well-known semantics associated to the use
of fonts in mathematics, giving font information in
Altavista searches will be of limited use.
Andries
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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