On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> ...for
> a mathematician a change in font style can convey far more information
> than a change in script (say Latin versus Greek)...
This is true in other technical areas as well. In Algol 60, at least in
the formal presentation style, boldface vs. non-bold is very significant.
Yet programming-language people are not asking for separate alphabetic
characters for writing keywords.
> + 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.
This is what software is for. Over twenty years ago, EQN understood that
when the user wrote $x+y$, the letters should be in italics but the plus
shouldn't be. There is no need to do this yourself! Nor should something
as fundamental as a character set be messed up on the assumption that
mathematicians can and should do the equivalent of hand-setting type.
> ...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.
This is a huge step backward, and a dreadful mistake. People who want to
use manual typewriters can find them in junk stores.
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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