It can be handled at a different level; when one types 3:5 in a
Unicode-complient TeX engine, what gets output to the output file is the
ratio not the colon, and colon gets output with 3\colon{}5.

Regards,
 Khaled

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 06:00:24PM -0700, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
> That is, they may be spaced differently (depending on the font and
> environment).
> 
> I'm not against pointing to RATIO for specific math contexts, but to tell Joe
> Smith that he should be using a different character to say that "the ratio of
> gravel to sand should be 3:1" is artificial and pointless.
> 
> ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
> Mark
> 
> — Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledho...@eglug.org> wrote:
> 
>     They are spaced differently. Attached how they are rendered by TeX,
>     using its default spacing rules, the first is the ratio (which is spaced
>     as a relational symbol) and the second is the colon (which is spaced as
>     punctuation mark), both in math mode, and the last one is the colon in
>     text mode.
> 
>     On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 04:22:06PM -0700, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
>     > I would disagree about the preference for ratio; I think it is a
>     historical
>     > accident in Unicode. 
>     >
>     > What people use and have used for ratio is simply a colon. One writes
>     3:5, and
>     > I doubt that there was a well-established visual difference that 
> demanded
>     a
>     > separate code for it, so someone would need to write 3∶5 instead.
>     >
>     > Mark
>     >
>     > — Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     > On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Asmus Freytag <asm...@ix.netcom.com>
>     wrote:
>     >
>     >     U+2236 RATIO
>     >     * Used in preference to 003A : to denote division or scale
>     >
>     >
> 
> 

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