At 11:26 AM 11/7/01 -0800, Eric Muller wrote: >Let's rewind to 1996. I encode a document, and I want a math "less-than or >equal" character. The picture I want for it has the equal bar slanted. >Looking throughout my Unicode 2.0 standard, I conclude that U+2264, >LESS-THAN OR EQUAL is what I want (with a font that happens to have a >variant glyph compared to the code chart glyph).
In earlier versions of Unicode the slanted and horizontal bar forms of these characters were considered mere glyph differences of each other, even though only one of them was depicted. >Let's fast-forward to the day were Unicode 3.2 is published, and I encode a >follow-up document. Should I continue to use U+2264, so that my users get a >consistent search-and-replace behavior, or do I try to be modern and switch >to U+2a7d, LESS-THAN OR SLANTED EQUAL, which seems more appropriate? In Unicode 3.2, we've re-researched the math symbol repertoire and discovered that we need to encode each version separately. While this provides an overall much more useful set of math symbols, it does pose the kinds of questions Eric raises. However, many of the existing fonts did show 2264 with the shape it has in Unicode 3.2, which is why it's the shape that was shown from Unicode 3.0 (not just from 3.2) shows the shape with the horizontal bar. [This also the shape that is shown in ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000(E)]. A./
