Re: Unicode and math symbols

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

   On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:

   > But nobody is heeding that avise!  Applications in Windows NT *are*
   > using them.  And I would not be suprised if they were put in after
   > arm twisting from the `Seattle Satans' as Sebastain refers to them.

   No, no. fi and fl are in Mac fonts, too. Some are definitely due
   to MS, but it's not fair to blame MS for all of them.

You get the polarity wrong: I think it is a *good* thing they are in there :)

And yes, just about all 30,000 fonts in Type 1 format have fi and fl.
Even the ones on Windows.  Only you can't use them in Windows unless
you have an application that can reencode them on the fly (like DVIWindo :), 
but they are there in the font.  Even the TrueType fonts MicroSoft supplies
with Windows have these glyphs.  And you can easily get at them in NT,
even NT 3.51.  So its not a question of the fonts, but the platform.
You can't get at ff, ffi, ffl on the Mac, even if the fonts have them
(as Lucida Bright does).

   > And it fails in that.  It *does* succeed in assiging unique codes to
   > characters from many languages.  But it fails in dealing with the
   > different writing systems which have all sorts of features not found
   > in Western languages.  Look for example at the rapidly growing
   > `alphabetic presentation forms' put in to try and cope with a bit of this.

   I guess you mean extended Greek and Latin, with lots of diacritic
   combinations? The main reason they are in is that some ISO people

No, actually I meant the `alphabetic presentation forms' - which now have
a few  Latin ligatures some other stuff and pages upon pages of Arabic
`alphabetic presentation forms'.

   > Aside from that we don't want a hundred different versions of UNICODE++
   > (like the mess we have with \special).  I have put dotlessj at FB0F,
   > but who knows where you will put it?

   Guess you have never heard about the private zone? That's where
   such things go if you want to create the least amount of problems
   you can.

You miss my point. I don't care where you put them.  The point is that if
everyone decides for him or herself where to put them, we will have a mess.
If the UNICODE consortium decides it may be a mess, but everyone
will be dealing with the *same* mess.

   Regards,	Martin.