I'm reasonably sure that this question reflects my own ignorance, rather than some problem with the standard, but nonetheless, I am confused.
For a start, we have the letters A to Z starting at 000041.
These are the normal letters.
Then we have the circled forms starting at 0024B6.
These were added because of compatibility issues with East-Asian character sets.
Then we have the fullwidth forms starting at 00FF21.
These were added because of compatibility issues with East-Asian character sets.
Now we have mathematical bold forms starting at 01D400,
These are to be used in mathematics, where bold & non-bold characters mean different things.
mathematical italic forms starting at 1D434, mathematical bold italic forms starting at 1D468 mathematical script forms starting at 1D49C, mathematical bold script forms starting at 1D4D0, mathematical fraktur forms starting at 1D504, mathematical double-struck forms starting at 1D538,
See above.
Aren't these differences that could be better managed by, say, clicking on the BOLD button in a GUI environment.
If your software supports mark-up, yes. If you want to encode mathematics in plain text, you'll have to use the mathematical bold, italic etc. characters. Most mathematical formul� will require mark-up for different reasons, though.
Stefan
