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Mathematical typesetting principles

At 20:28 -0500 1998/11/19, Y&Y, Inc. wrote:
>Just to confuse the lower case <-> upper case, upright <-> slanted,
>variable <-> constant, single letter <-> multi letter soup some more,
>note that often vectors are written with upright bold letters.
>Particularly in engineering and some applied math.  This usually
>trips up plain TeX users when they get to a vector commonly used
>to denote angular velocity namely a bold omega.  Until they
>find CMMIB.  They are then so happy, that the slant does not bother
>them any.

This is the usual problem that can be avoided in the future if Unicode adds
those shapes for use in mathematics:

Upright bold is used in mathematics as a tradition from the days of led
typesetting: It was expensive to keep different fonts not used much, and
Bold Italics is (or was) rarely used in another context. A similar thing
applies to the Greek fonts.

But this has changed with the advent of computers, and the best thing we
can do is to provide the shapes, giving the mathematicians the choice.

  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/>