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Re: Typesetting rules in physics

At 10:47 -0500 1998/11/18, Michael John Downes wrote:
>Does anyone have any idea how the convention developed that in
>mathematics changing R from normal weight to bold means also changing
>it from italic to upright? I hypothesize that bold italic fonts were
>simply less commonly available in compositors type cases in the era of
>lead typesetting, and the lack was resolved by the obvious
>substitution of bold upright.

This is the reason normally given: Bold italics usually was not available
in led typesetting. Each style was in effect a whole new font, and it was
expensive keeping many different fonts which was not used very much.

>To put it another way: Suppose you started using bold italic instead
>of bold upright for Latin letters in math. Would it look bizarre and
>wrong?

This is what people want to do, but which has not been possible due to
limitations in technology.

  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/>