On 2012-07-11, Hans Aberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> There are a number of other incompatibilities between original TeX and
> Unicode:
>
> For example, ASCII letters are in TeX math mode typeset in italics, but
> Unicode has a mathematical italics style, so ASCII letters should be typeset
> upright in a strict Unicode mode. And similar for Greek letters, I gather.
Unicode is about plain text. TeX is about fine typesetting.
There's no reason why TeX should typeset ASCII as upright, any more
than it should typeset "\begin{section}" as that literal string! The
use of ASCII characters in math mode is simply an input convention, to
indicate the desired output of italic letters in a style appropriate
for single-letter mathematical variables.
The use of other Unicode characters in TeX input files is also simply
an input convention; how they get typeset depends on many other things
than what they look like in the code charts.
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