Re: Unicode and math symbols

["Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>]

On Mon, 24 Feb 1997, Chris Rowley wrote:

> Martin
> 
> > 
> > Please note that for one area where you would assume that
> > dealing with "meaning" would be especially easy, the
> > character/glyph model that is the general base of
> > Unicode/ISO 10646 had to be changed somewhat (to
> > come closer to "glyph" than for other scripts) to
> > accomodate for present practice and user expectations.
> 
> Sounds interesting: to what do you refer?

Well, there is a draft for an explanation of the character/
glyph model with respect to CJK, which will probably
become an informative annex to 10646.
The main point where "shape" is preferred over "meaning" is
where characters have been simplified so much as to lead
to totally different shapes that cannot easily be identified,
and where simplifications have lead to merging of several
originally different characters. In both cases, "simulating
paper" in the sense that there are different codepoints
for the major shape differences is the better solution,
because users mostly are not aware anymore e.g. about
originally differentiated characters.


> > Similar things may apply to math (or may not apply).
> 
> Indeed: See next message:-).

The "may not apply" refers to the fact that for the same
symbol shape, simbolic operations and such might differ
depending on the semantics. For CJK, this is not an issue,
it is equally difficult to do reasoning on Chinese or
Japanese texts as it is for English and such.

Regards,	Martin.