Hi,
I'd like to ask about a decision that needs to be made for upcoming OOo
3.3 which features the new and fixed OpenSymbol font (see issue 105084).
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=105084
Previously (up to, and including OOo 3.2) a formula like:
%MU %PI " " nitalic {%MU %PI} " " italic {%MU %PI} newline
%eta %kappa " " nitalic {%eta %kappa} " " italic {%eta %kappa}
would have been rendered as in 'mathOSF_OOo3.2.png'.
Please notice that you can't get a straight %PI it is slanted or even
more slanted. :-( This however did not apply to %MU since the first
comes from the StarSymbol/OpenSymbol font and the latter actually from
TimesNewRoman since the old OpenSymbol font did only feature those
non-Latin-looking Greek characters. That of course was a bug of the old
font.
This problem (and others) are now fixed in the new OpenSymbol font that
will come with OOo 3.0.
Currently(!) with a developers build like DEV300_m84 the above formula
will be rendered as in 'mathOSF_OOo3.3.png'. You can easily see that
'italic' and 'nitalic' commands now have the proper effect on the
characters.
Also the non-altered charatcer (see first column) are defined as slanted
by default right now since that is visually the best equivalent to the
old look. However that is what I'am unsure about...
The question is: should the Greek lower- and upper case characters be
straight or slanted by default?
In every formula at least one of the sample cases
'%PI'
'nitalic PI' or
'italic PI'
will look different compared to OOo 3.2 if rendered anew in OOo 3.3!
(And it can't be fixed on import.) Also changing the default for Greek
symbols to straight will not solve this since then only one of the other
cases will turn out different.
If we were to create the Greek symnbols from scratch without any regard
to how it looked like in older versions we would simply take a look at
about any Math school book or at LaTex. In that case our solution would be:
Solution 1)
- Greek uppercase characters should be straight. They are usually used
for operators or as set names, and those are usually layouted straigth.
- Greek lowercase characters should be slanted. They normally get used
as variables and those have a slanted layout.
Other possible solutions are:
Solution 2)
- All Greek characters should be slanted by default since that is the
best visual equivalent to OOo 3.2 (at least if no modifiers like
'italic' and 'nitalic' are used).
Solution 3)
- All Greek characters should be straight since that is what the
unmodified charcters in the font look like.
Solution 4)
We'll choose one of the above but still like to 'work-around' the
probably rather often need to explicitly write one of the modifiers
before the character. Thus we are going to introduce new 'shortcuts' for
those. It could be one or both of the following
4a) For each Greek character introduce another one (prefixed with i):
E.g for %PI add %iPI, where %iPI refers to an italic uppercase PI
4b) For each Greek character introduce another one:
E.g for %PI add %nPI, where %nPI refers to a non-italic straight
version of the character.
Thus the choices to make are
- one of 1), 2) and 3)
and
- 4a) and/or 4b) or none of those
Please tell us the favored solution.
Regards,
Thomas
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