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More on math, I'm afraid

I thought a bit more about math font encodings at the weekend, and in
particular what I said on Friday about using the math fonts as
repositories for characters such as \dagger, \yen and lining numerals.

In that mailing, I wondered about the effect of styles such as
Concrete/Euler, where the math font bears no resembalence to the text
font.  In retrospect, I realize I was confusing two issues: a) the
math font encoding, and b) the math fonts in a document style.  There
is no reason why the two have to be the same---we can have a
math-encoded ccr, and use it for the lining digits, even if math is
being set in Euler.

So, a modest proposal...  How about a font encoding similar to cmmi,
containing:

a) The cmmi glyphs, except with lining rather than non-lining
digits, 

b) The humanist symbols from cmsy, msam and msbm, including \dagger,
\yen, etc. for use outside mathematics,

c) If there's room (ho ho), this might be a good place to put the caps
and small caps, universal currency, and the other bits and bobs that
didn't make it into the Cork encoding.  Should Cyrillic or Hebrew
letters used mathematically live here?

Then each text font would have a Cork encoding (for text) and
a math-encoding (for paragraph symbols, small caps, etc).  For
mathematics, the families used would be:

0. roman, math encoded.
1. italic, math encoded.
2. geometric symbol font.
3. extensions font.
4. a font containing open, black letter, calligraphic,
   and copperplate letter forms (this should ideally be a vf pointing
   to full text fonts, but that's probably quite far into the future).

plus, optionally, bold, sans, and typewriter, math encoded.

Chris Rowley (and barbara?) suggested that we needed a math encoding
for every font, not just italic.  Sounds like a good idea to me...

Alan.