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Re: Remaining missing glphs

Answers to Ulriks historical questions:

>>>1. There's a slot for an Arabic letter `Dal'.  Does this bear any
   relation to the Hebrew letter `Daleth', which we already have?
   If so, could we perhaps get rid it and gain another free slot?

No, it doesn't. Daleth is another tranfinite cardinal, but that dal was 
used by a french publisher because of shortage of different d's for 
differentials. It was reported by Yannis. Since it seems to be used in only 
one book and doesn not need to agree in style with any other mathematical 
symbol, it can be moved to a far-out encoding for rarely used characters 
indeed.

>>>2. There are two slots for `Chi1' and `Chi1upright'.  According
   to the Unicode table there is no such thing as a variant of
   Greek capital letter Chi (quote unlike in the case of Upsilon), 
   so I wonder if this got into Justin's list by mistake?

No, it isn't a mistake. Nuclear and particle physicists, specially those 
dealing with Chiral perturbation theory, like a Chi symbol different from a 
plain letter X.

>>>3. There are two slots for faked `Vbar' and `Vbarslanted' glyphs.
   Accoding to Justin's report, these were mentioned in a message
   forwared by Joerg which I couldn't find in the mail archives.
   Could someone clarify what these are supposed to be good for
   and whether both variants are actually needed?  Personally,
   I've never seen such a notation in physics, so I'd like to
   see a reference justifying their use.

I have digged in my archives, but didn't retrieve the message I have 
actually forwarded to Justin Ziegler. I only could find the original 
requester of that symbol: jvpurcel@vela.acs.oakland.edu, but I didn't test 
if this e-mail address is still valid more than four years later. Since I 
didn't see other requests for this symbol on any TeX related mailing list 
or news group, it is probably not very needed.

>>>4. There are two slots for \varbeta (`beta1' and `beta1upright').
   This one, I could find in the Unicode tables (U+03D0) listed
   as `Greek Symbol Beta', so it is probably justified to leave
   that one in, even if it is not currently available in Metafont.
   (Yannis's OmegaTimesGreek (TUGboat 17#2) also has this one.)

I don't know, if the variant betas are relevant for _mathematical_ 
typesetting. On the other hand, I have seen those brezel-betas in classical 
greek _texts_ typeset in france.

>>>5. Finally, there are Stigma, Digamma, Koppa, and Sampi which
   Yannis calls Greek numerals (and provides in both upper- and 
   lowercase), while Unicode 2.0 list them as Greek capitals.
   I am confused as to their significance and use in math mode
   outside of very specific applications in Greek typesetting,
   so I'm skeptical about there justification in a math font.
   Could someone perhaps provide some background information?

UNicode seems to be confused about the greek numerals. Stigma/Digamma is 
greek numeral 6, Qoppa is 90 and Sanpi is 900. From a modern point of view 
(in the antique times, the uppercase/lowercase distinction didn't exist yet)
both capital and lowercase version are needed. But in a math font? Maybe 
for typesetting texts about ancient greek mathematics? I'm not sure about 
them, though I agree on the point on digamma: AMS compatibility requires it.

--J"org Knappen