Some time ago in this list, Mr Bernard Miller posted a note about his Bytext system.
If one goes to http://www.bytext.org and then goes through to the documentation page at http://www.bytext.org/documentation.htm one may download a copy of the latest edition of The Bytext Standard. I chose to download the pdf file which is 606 kilobytes. On pages 34 and 35 of that document are details of arrow parentheses invented by Mr Miller. On page 72 is a statement concerning intellectual property rights. I feel that it would be very useful if these eight arrow parenthesis characters are used in a Unicode compatible environment. As some readers may know I have been researching on my courtyard codes system. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/court000.htm Courtyard codes are placed within the Private Use Area of Unicode. The above document being indexed from an index page about some of my other uses of the Private Use Area. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm It occurs to me that if the eight arrow parenthesis characters were encoded into my courtyard codes system, then that would be potentially of great usefulness. I am thinking in terms of U+F388 through to U+F38F being used for this purpose, with the codes being assigned to the arrow parentheses in the order in which Mr Miller lists them in The Bytext Standard. If this happens then the way to express a subscript uppercase A character would be as follows. U+F38A U+0041 U+F38B The U+0041 is the code for A in regular Unicode, so immediately there is a general method for subscripting any Unicode character. Indeed subscripts of subscripts could be used by nesting the arrow parentheses. For example, a subscript A subscript B could be expressed as follows. U+0061 U+F38A U+0041 U+F38A U+0042 U+F38B U+F38B The U+0061 is the code for a in regular Unicode and the U+0042 is the code for B in regular Unicode. Arrow parentheses allow a mathematical expression involving superscripts, subscripts, integral limits, summation limits and various other items to be expressed in a linear manner, which makes those expressions able to be stored in a Unicode file in what is essentially a plain text storage format, though I mention that this will not be plain text as such as it involves the use of code points for what might be considered markup. I know little about XML so I do not know whether this suggestion will be a suitable solution for the requirement of the person who wrote to the Unicode Consortium. However, perhaps it will be a helpful suggestion. Certainly using the codings which I suggest would involve use of code points from the Private Use Area. However, as the need is now, then even if the arrow parenthesis characters are one day promoted to regular Unicode, the use of Private Use Area characters now may be what is needed to achieve the desired result. By placing these code point ideas into this posting to the Unicode mail list, they will be archived in the archives of the Unicode mail list and also sent to many people interested in Unicode around the world. So, although they are only Private Use Area encodings, it is possible that these encodings will be noted in many places by many people. It is simply speculation as to whether few or many people will choose to recognize such code point allocations for their own uses. The use of these code points would raise the question as to how a string containing them should be displayed. The idea is that in a plain text editor mode, the arrow parenthesis characters would be displayed with the glyphs shown by Mr Miller in The Bytext Standard. In a graphical display, the arrow parenthesis characters would not be displayed, yet would influence how characters included between matching pairs of arrow parenthesis characters are displayed. This is no more complicated in principle than viewing an HTML page in Internet Explorer then viewing the source code of the HTML page in Notepad then going back to the Internet Explorer display. Whether any font makers would add glyphs for the eight arrow parenthesis characters into the code positions U+F388 though to U+F38F remains to be seen, though I am cautiously optimistic in the matter. Also the possibility exists for the person who originally wrote to the Unicode Consortium to have his or her own font produced in addition to any font maker making such a font available. William Overington 31 July 2002 -----Original Message----- From: Magda Danish (Unicode) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: unicode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 8:46 PM Subject: Subscript & Superscript > >> -----Original Message----- >> Date/Time: Tue Jul 30 12:26:40 EDT 2002 >> Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Report Type: FAQ Suggestion >> >> We need to know how to express a Subscript letter in Unicode. >> On your site, we've found in 2070-208E how to express a >> Superscript letter or number or a Subscript number, but there >> is no information about how to write a Subscript letter. >> We're using the XML Authoring Software Epic developed by >> Arbortext. We need to be able to express mathmatical >> formulas in XML and we're trying to use Unicode to do it. >> >> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- >> (End of Report) >> >> > >
