Re: [KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE: Re: psnfss and lw35nfss]

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

   correct me if I'm wrong, but the unicode people have defined the
   lonely accent circumflex? & it's not a linguistic glyph 
   (never used for itself) 

The UNICODE people - like any good committee - are not of one mind on this.

On the one hand they explicitly state (at least in earlier versions)
that the `non spacing' accents are provided for constructing composites,
yet also insist on listing all composites that actually occur.  

There are also `spacing' accents, by the way, whatever that is.  And
the non-spacing ones are non-sense since they are meant to accent the
character that comes before - nobody has though about the spacing /
kerning issues.

   & They can't prevent mathematicians from inventing  thousands of new
   notations when required ? You for sure know that the \hat / \vector
   accents are used over any letters , resulting in composite glyphs
   never seen in any language? So forgetting a dotlessj in Unicode, as
   base for any accented variations of \j is an error. I don't know
   abroad, but here in France, any teenager has used the basis 
   (\vec \i, \vec\j) of the euclidean plane once.

That is math.  And yes, there should be a dotlessj in a math font.

UNICODE only half-heartedly covers math.  Lucida New Math and
Lucida New Math Expert covers many more glyphs than are in UNICODE.
In fact, I have the feeling that the UNICODE committee may have
decided to orphan math support, thinking it is a msitake they
put it in in the first place.  Maybe barbara beeton knows more.

But you know, *anyone* can propose new characters to the UNICODE
committee :=) Maybe we should lobby for dotlessj.  Perhaps form a non
profit organization to give dotlessj its proper rights?

Regards, Berthold.