Florian Weimer wrote on 2000-08-10 11:33 UTC:
> I agree that it makes some sense to have a seperate mathematical
> alphabet because mathematically speaking, "v" and "V" are indeed very
> different characters. But having thirteen or so different alphabets
> seems a bit overkill to me.
Nobody forces you to use or implement all of them. The authors of the
STIX proposal have carefully collected quotations from the academic
literature, where all the listed style variants have been used to denote
semantical differences, including the monospaced and sans-serif
variants. There are people out there who need some of these variants, so
there is little reason not to allocate Plane1 positions for them right
from the beginning. I am quite convinced that STIX really just follow
well-documented user requirements and are not just making up new
notational conventions, even if I would never use sans-serif fonts
myself for mathematical typesetting for instance.
> What about TeX? When I write $x$, this doesn't mean "I want an italic
> letter 'x'", but "I want the letter 'x' from the mathematical
> alphabet". If you've ever used AMS Euler fonts instead of Computer
> Modern Math fonts, you know the difference.
Unicode does not aim to define precisely, what "MATH ITALIC" means
(minimum slant angle, etc.), and I would be happy to accept the AMS
Euler fonts as a (slightly unconventional) version of a math italic font.
It does distinguish itself from an upright font in ways very similar to an
italic font, except that it is not slanted. As long as it is used
consistently within a publication, a reader will quickly recognize that
AMS Euler is used here with the same semantics as a more traditional
math italic typeface.
I don't see here any real non-nitpicking problems.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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