On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:22 AM, John H Palmieri <jhpalmier...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mar 24, 10:48 am, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: >> William Stein wrote: >> > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:58 AM, John H Palmieri <jhpalmier...@gmail.com> >> > wrote: >> >> Currently the latex methods for ZZ, RR, etc. all used mathbf -- plain >> >> boldface -- rather than mathbb -- 'blackboard' bold. See also the (not >> >> currently in use) file SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/doc/common/macros.tex: >> >> lots of mathbf, no mathbb. >> >> >> Is this an official style choice for Sage, or did it just >> >> spontaneously occur? >> >> > I "officially" chose it for the same reason I chose mathbb in all the >> > books/articles I wrote, which is that numerous people in publishing >> > convinced me that it is a better choice. >> >> I'm curious what the persuasive reasoning was. I've always liked mathbb. > > My impression is that people (maybe Bourbaki?) decided that bold-face > should be used for Z, R, etc. Then people giving lectures wanted a > way to reproduce this, so someone invented blackboard bold for use on > a blackboard. And then the handwritten blackboard bold began to creep > into printed material, and we now have mathbb. So to me it seems sort > of backwards to use blackboard bold when you can use ordinary bold > face. > > Also, Wikipedia claims that Serre disapproves of the use of blackboard > bold in typesetting, and Serre's opinion carries some weight... >
Thanks John. That's precisely the argument that influenced me long ago... William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
