Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Henry Spencer wrote on 2000-08-09 20:24 UTC:
> > Indeed so; such a notation would have to be extensible... but then, any
> > good descriptive markup language already is. Part of the task of getting
> > a paper formatted (printed, etc.) would be to review the specific concepts
> > used and assign formatting conventions to any that are sufficiently rare
> > not to have defaults. A suggested set of such conventions might even be
> > part of the usual markup, *accompanying* (not interspersed within!) the
> > actual text of the paper.
>
> This has been tried and failed several times.
What about TeX? When I write $x$, this doesn't mean "I want an italic
letter 'x'", but "I want the letter 'x' from the mathematical
alphabet". If you've ever used AMS Euler fonts instead of Computer
Modern Math fonts, you know the difference. Of course, this is only a
bit of abstraction, but it's more than what is contained in the STIX
proposal. In the past, you would have denoted the set of integers by
DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Z, which would print as a open-face or bold
character. (The double-struck characters don't provide much more than
characters for the standard sets, so no one probably used them for
anything else, so this was safe.) With the STIX proposal, there's now
a complete alphabet of open-face and bold characters, and it's far
more likely that these letters are used for non-standard stuff. As a
result, automatic replacement is possible, and there's less
abstraction. (Maybe these arguments are a bit far-fetched, but I'm
not sure.)
I agree that it makes some sense to have a seperate mathematical
alphabet because mathematically speaking, "v" and "V" are indeed very
different characters. But having thirteen or so different alphabets
seems a bit overkill to me.
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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