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Re: LaTeX's internal char prepresentation (UTF8 or Unicode?)

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Fri, 23 Feb 2001 17:08:37 +0100

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 I would like to point out that the debate on the LICR and related matters has mainly only delt with what one might call the LaTeX Text Character Model (LTCM), but there is another character model in current LaTeX which should also be given some thought: the LaTeX Math Character Model (LMCM). Possibly one could also distinguish a LaTeX Verbatim Character Model (LVCM) (sorry about all these acronyms), but I'm less certain about that one. Luckily matters may be easier in these models because there we don't have do deal with that multilingual complex of problems which noone completely understands because noone knows all the languages. Concerning the LMCM, I believe the expressed opinion was that greek and cyrillic letters (as input characters) should be allowed in math, but that symbols outside ASCII should not (except when necessary for compability reasons). I suspect user demands may make the latter problematic if the input encoding becomes Unicode (in some form), especially if they get the math characters well sorted out, but that is a distant problem. In the world of 8-bit encodings a restriction of input symbols in math to ASCII is probably the right things to do. Allowing greek letters does however raise some interesting problems. Many of the greek letters have var-forms in the current math fonts, so which form should the input letter select? E.g. \epsilon and \varepsilon are hardly distinct enough to count as different letters/symbols, they are merely different glyphs, so which one should it be? I for one much prefer \varepsilon, so I would like to have some interface which lets the user select this. In a more general view, one should perhaps try to clear up the LMCM so that the user commands select characters (or character plus math class) rather than glyphs. This could make it easier to provide new math fonts in that one wouldn't have to concentrate on providing precisely the same set of glyphs as the CM math fonts do, but could provide more (very tricky these days, as new glyph forms require new commands that make documents which use them incompatible with other math fonts) or fewer (possible by duplicating the glyphs) forms of the characters as it suits the design. Lars Hellström