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

Re: Math Arrows and Harpoons

At 10:34 -0500 1998/11/13, Barbara Beeton wrote:
>if someone broadly trained in mathematics would join in the unicode
>effort and devote the time and energy necessary to change their point
>of view, i believe that this would be successful, though it would take
>a while.

Actually, I considered doing that at one point in time; I had some
discussions with director of the Unicode project, to see what it had to
give to me.

  My conclusions was that, first the dogma is wrong for classifying the
math symbols, and second it is too late to insert any new principles into
Unicode at this point (and perhaps never). So I decided to drop it because
of that.

>true, but unless math is to continue to suffer the inability to be
>promulgated via ordinary web browsers, an acceptable unicode presence
>is necessary.  i hope the stix submission will manage to improve the
>present condition to a level that is at least marginally acceptable.

  So this is what I think is the best option for Unicode right now: Put in
some math symbols so that plain text (WWW) math can be at least a little
better. There are other projects under way, MathML and OpenMath, which can
do more. Perhaps there should be an UniMath handling the math characters,
with principles radically different from that of Unicode.

  The best way is perhaps to provide a font with each arrow head in only
one direction, and so forth for tail and shafts and shaft ornaments, and
then using a language like PostScript which knows how to rotate them.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>