"Roger B. Sidje" wrote on 2002-06-18 17:51 UTC: > Even the new Unicode 3.2 still doesn't cover all the characters > that are needed for MathML layout. [...] stretchy MathML characters.
The bracket components are in Unicode 3.2 for the sole reason that they were also present in legacy terminal character sets such as DEC Technical. They were added *only* as part of an effort to enable UTF-8 terminal emulators to provide the full glyph repertoire offered by some historic video terminals, such that tools like luit can emulate these too if they want to. These bracket components will hopefully *NOT* be missunderstood by the maths layout community as the proper way to typeset mathematical formulas. (*a feeling of horror crawls down my spine just from the thought*) What the maths layout community really needs is some extension to scalable font formats, such that you can specify to a rendering engine, what exact width and height you need an existing Unicode character such as all the dozens of brackets, roots, etc. rendered in, and then the font file will contain a little bit of code that converts these size requirements into suitably positioned Bezier control points. Multiple-master fonts do that already. Most of the technology is already out there. Please forget immediately about the Unicode 3.2 bracket components for MathML, unless you are rendering formulas for characters cell terminal emulators (for which I think they are quite sufficient)! Free your mind from the awful way in which TeX plugs together its brackets from glyph components, which was dictated by the limitations of the 1970s phototypesetter which Knuth had to use when he designed the first incarnation of TeX. Unicode 3.2 contains every character that MathML needs to communicate with a font rendering engine. Glyphs can be streched by telling the glyph rendering engine to so, and the font has to contain all the information to do this properly. Any other solution just leads to the horrible entanglement between style sheet and exact alignment of bracket fragments in special maths fonts, which makes it in TeX for example practically impossible to use for math typesetting any other font than those designed specifically for TeX. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
