Re: Unicode and math symbols

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

   Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 11:39:47 +0100 (MET)
   From: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
   Sender: mduerst@enoshima
   cc: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk, BNB@math.ams.org, tex-font@math.utah.edu
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   On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:

   >    The correct solution is to not have the system do the conversion
   >    between character codepoints and glyph indices, but to leave that
   >    to the font (which should know best). Quickdraw GX (from Apple) and
   >    TrueType open are approaches to this, although I would prefer
   >    it if the knowledge of the font about the mapping were available
   >    as methods (in the OO sense) and not just as tables.
   > 
   > I don't agree with this.  GX hides under hood much of what a
   > typesetting application needs to know about (such as ligatures).  
   > The main idea behind GX is to add some apparent typesetting capabilities
   > to dumb appications.  Useless for TeX.

   I just said that GX and TT Open are going in the right direction.
   But I agree that they don't go far enough. I already say what
   I think is needed, see my other mail for more details about this.

Yes, and I just said that they go in the *wrong* direction :=).  They
make it possible for brain-dead applications like Microsoft Word to
appear to have some typographic savy.  However, they actually stand in
the way of something like TeX that needs to put togther and take apart
things like ligatures itself to do its paragraph line-breaking/
hyphenation algorithm.  It is hiding under the hood all the machinery
that needs to be accessible to sophisticated typesetting engine.

   Regards,	Martin.