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From: Asmus Freytag <[email protected]>
To: Unicode Mailing List <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, 7 May 2012, 1:36
Subject: Variant glyphs for mathematical symbols
First question:
When the integral symbols were encoded in Unicode there was
discussion of the fact that these were deliberately unifying an
upright and a slanted style of integral.
Now, I'm pretty sure that I've seen both styles in print at
some point, but I can't seem to find any TrueType or OpenType
fonts that support the slanted style. Or, I may just not know
where to look.
Is this style still in use anywhere, and do people make or
maintain
fonts for it?
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the Stix fonts provide glyphs for slanted integral signs
Euclid, too, has a slanted symbol,
both styles are still used in print, but the slanted style seems to me to be
the more common of the two
integral signs are commonly multi-storey, so implementing slanted styles in
TrueType fonts is not easy
that is to say, implementing them in TrueType alone is not easy -- OpenType
helps, and MathType and firemath (among others) can solve most other problems
at a later stage in the proceedings
I cannot think of a single instance, real or artificial, where a change of
style is semantically significant, but mathematicians can be quite loose and
free in their notation, so if 2 symbols are available, some day somebody will
use them simultaneously with different meanings
/phil
