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 Re: Multilingual Encodings Summary 2.2 Thierry Bouche <[log in to unmask]> Mon, 21 May 2001 09:23:20 +0200 text/plain (44 lines) Hans Aberg: » >I have seen examples of both types of epsilon being used to denote set » >membership, » Lars Hellström : » No doubt due to "limitations in past typesetting". Well, that should be checked against Cajori. There has been a time where the root sign was r.', i suspect that epsilon (whatever form, it was on manuscript first...) was the former form of the belonging to sign. Of course, printing technologies have ironed out some notations that could come back when it was enhanced (back to the roots, which I had studied at lengths in Cajori... the precedence of the form (fenced math expr) rather than using the rule over to denote the scope of the root was imposed by the cost of the second form. In this respect, reading the book by Chaundy et al. gives a very interesting picture of the monotype time, when mostly anything was possible, but any requirement for a special symbol (thus punches design, etc.) or layout could slow down the process and raise the costs in discouraging scales. » >Further, if you want to make it impossible to use \varepsilon and \epsilon » >side by side in the same document, you will have to make sure that in all » >of the world literature in the past up till now it has never been used that » >way, because that is how the requirements of Unicode were set up. » » I'm not saying that it should be completely impossible to use them side by » side (even though I would question any attempts to do so), but they » shouldn't be provided as distinct characters in the default set-up. Yes, I mostly agree. Making it hard for authors to use in a same paper two versions of epsilon or phi is a good thing for the readers. Allowing them to choose which shape they prefer is no problem, especially if the publisher can override this with his styles. Honestly, when i read maths with a \varphi next to a \phi, i never know whether it's keying error or semantic subtility. The problem being that any available glyph in a standard font set will be used by mathematicians... On the other hand, pi and varpi should cohabit, but maybe with a more semantic name (pi/doricpi?). Thierry Bouche `