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Re: Proposed math coding scheme

>Karl Berry writes:

>As you imply, Humanist-Geometric is a continuum, not a dichotomy, and
>along several dimensions.  

Very true unfortunately, but politics and font encodings are the art
of the possible...  There are two fonts which contain non-extensible
math symbols: currently these are cmsy and cmmi, and it's pretty
arbitrary which glyph is in which font.  I'm not suggesting the
Humanist/Geometric divide is a platonic division of glyphs, but a
useful hack to make life slightly easier for font designers: a
geometric CM symbol font should be adaptable for use with other fonts.

>I don't understand why we want to put any non-mathematical characters
>into the math fonts.  

Neither do I, but we have to find somewhere to put glyphs such as
\dagger, \P, etc.  Either we put them in a separate font, containing
71 glyphs (29 greek + 23 Greek + 10 alt. numerals + 3 music + 8 from cmsy) 
or we cram them into the math fonts (the Greek and numerals need to be
in math anyway).  I'm a bit worried about the amount of space math
encoded character fonts would take up, without every text font having
an extension font.

>There aren't nearly enough positions in a 256-character encoding to
>specify even all the useful math characters.  Why even consider adding
>the bullet and dagger and so forth?

I agree totally---but these characters aren't in the Cork encoding,
and we need to find homes for them.  Either they should be in the math
fonts (the current messy solution) or in a separate encoding (eating
up even more font memory).  

Alan.

Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 59         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden