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Hans Aberg <[log in to unmask]>
Tue, 27 Feb 2001 16:10:36 +0100
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At 10:07 +0000 2001/02/27, David Carlisle wrote:
>> Yes I did (apart from the fact that I could find no convenient archive to
>> pick them down, making the process excruciatingly slow on my computer).
>
>There's a zip file of the spec linked from the front page.

Well, I got the MathML spec, but it did not contain any glyphs.

>You may also prefer the PDF charts available from the unicode.org site.

I looked at that site, but I could not find suitably bundled PDF files. (I
am not sure it is so important anymore, as I found out what I wanted.)

>> I think these should be
>But that isn't the way ISO works.

Well, as for the addition of math font shapes, it works so, because I was
the guy pointing out that it ought to be, in view of the math semantics.

> It works by international ballot and
>negotiation over a period of several years... (Just for this one
>submission for math characters)

But somehow it snowballed in another direction, it seems. :-)

>> But perhaps Unicode has already made up its mind, so there is nothing to do
>> about it...
>
>Not quite, but almost.

Well, I am not sure it's worth bother about it:

On the one hand, it would be nice having access to the glyphs that might be
used in math.

But on the other hand, if one should do anything along the line I
suggested, one would have to rip out all the 1024 character positions, with
a new suggestion, and as you say re-vote...

-- I can slip a remark about monospaced fonts here though:

It seems me that the only(?) reason one is using a monospaced font in
computer science, is in order to get the text properly aligned. So, if one
somehow can get a better tab alignment system, there would be no need of
using a monospaced font.

In fact, I have some (old) computer books where the code (in Pascal) is
using normal (non-monospaced) fonts. And I recall that Unicode has better
tabs. (And books on parsers I looked into use normal math conventions, that
is, the use of fonts style with normal fonts in order to indicate
semantics.)

Perhaps LaTeX, as an alternative to a "verbatim" mode, should have an
environment where merely the indentations using spaces are translated into
suitable tab alignments, but otherwise one is using normal (non-monospaced
fonts).

  Hans Aberg

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