[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: What are the chances of...

ulrik vieth:
    What are the chances of a math fonts session at EuroTeX'98
    (March 29--31, 1998 in St.Malo, France) ?

i think that would be an excellent idea, if it could be arranged.

    -  How many of us are actually planning or at least considering
       to attend the conference and who would the participants?

i'm exploring the possibilities here at the math society, but am
not optimistic.  i feel that ams should be represented in this, but
whether it actually happens is up to the management.

matthias clasen:
    If we decide to `go public', I think that we would have to stop working 
    on the implementation and concentrate on documentation/presentation.

ulrik:
    I think it depends on what kind of presentation we want to go for.  It
    doesn't necessarily have to be all polished.  It might suffice to give
    an overview of where we started, what the design goals were, and what
    we have achieved by the time of the conference.  It might be perfectly
    fine just to say: ``This is what we have.  We're still working on some
    of the details, but we want to hear what you think about it, anyway.''

i agree.  whatever is in reasonable form by the deadline for papers
for the proceedings should appear there.  but i would be enthusiastic
to receive for tugboat a review of that plus a report of discussion
and/or decisions from the meeting itself, which cannot of course
appear in the proceedings as it will have been closed beforehand.

matthias:
    I think it would be helpful to prepare a list of possible issues 
    which could be changed versus fundamental design decisions which 
    would better not be revisited. Many items for this list can probably
    extracted from Justin Zieglers work and some are listed in the
    TODO file.

ulrik:
    Yes, indeed.  Reviewing the open issues and compiling a TODO list is
    certainly a good idea.  For instance, there are still a number of
    slots reserved for ``wierd'' symbols that are very unlikely to be ever
    filled in from the present repertoire of Metafont fonts unless somone
    will work on desiging them.  Perhaps we should also look into other
    work such as the MathML (HTML-Math) working draft to see what kind 
    of symbols we have incorporated that no one else has considered and
    what kind of symbols we haven't incldued that are used elsewhere.

i have been working on a related project, loosely associated with the
mathml work, about which i can't say more at this time.  one of the
goals of this work is identification of the actual symbol complement
now in use by various scientific/technical publishers as well as other
symbols requested, along with as much information as can be uncovered
about the meaning(s) and fields of use.  i hope it will be possible
for the results of our work and yours to converge somehow.

i am still allegedly the chair of the tug technical working group on
256-character math fonts; i have had to neglect this area because of
conditions at ams during the past couple of years, but feel that it
remains to be of very great importance, and am grateful that others
are carrying it forward.
						-- bb