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

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

Hi:  I got this from barbara and she has since informed me that she
had intenbed to send it to the whole list.  So here goes :=) berthold.

From: bbeeton <BNB@MATH.AMS.ORG>

berthold writes

    Well the UNICODE people have decided there is no such character as
    `dotlessj' in any language. The closest are `dotlessjdash' and
    `dotlessjinverteddash'.

and (to the best of my knowledge) i agree with the unicode people.
however, may i repeat once again,

                ****unicode is not a font standard****

many people are trying to make it one.  they are wrong.

i don't know what the solution is, but it's not to adopt unicode as
the basis for all fonts.  unicode hasn't got two (or three) different
sizes of sums or integral signs, *and* *shouldn't*.  same principle.

however, font creators/vendors don't, by and large, give a damn about
math, because it's just too small a piece of the market.  as i read
the other day (on the electronic math journal list?), whereas the
math community may represent a market of tens of thousands, most
vendors these days are aiming at tens of millions.  the only thing
that's going to make (most of) them look twice is money, hard cash,
up front.  lucida contains the math complement because chuck bigelow
was lifted from the rules of the marketplace by his macarthur grant.
adobe, provided with essentially the same fonts and glyphs by chuck,
botched it royally -- and rejected serious offers of free help to
get it right from people who knew what they were talking about.

						-- bb