Hello Will, A few questions from me. One 'up front': where does \mathrm fit in to all of this? On 20/05/2014 03:09, Will Robertson wrote: > The \mathbf command in particular has been abused in physics to denote > vectors and matrices, such as \mathbf{B} for magnetic field. I suspect the > situation is similar for sans math, with tensors using sans on occasion but > no doubt in other contexts used for multi-letter identifiers. (Examples > more than welcome; in fact, requested.) I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'abused' here: there isn't an obvious alternative to this, particularly if we bear in mind that the design here pre-dates Unicode by a long way. > In contrast, Unicode math defines a number of alphabets in a single Unicode > font, including mathematical italic and bold mathematical italic and many > more variations. In OpenType maths fonts to date, these symbols are all > designed as single-letter identifiers and not to be used for strings of > characters such as "Re" in italic or "Set" in bold. To be clear, the Unicode position is that e.g. bold-B for magnetic field should not come from the 'bold' font but from the bold-symbols part of a single maths font: correct? That being the case, have the Unicode people considered at all multi-letter identifiers or has this simply been missed at present? (Anyone on the list sufficiently well-informed about this?) > 1. \mathbf and friends go back to simply selecting a text font. Note that > they still need to remap \mathcode{}s in this case because normal unicode > math glyphs exist all the way up in Plane 1 where text fonts daren't to > tread. [snip] > 3. To get proper bold symbols, including Greek, we'll need a whole new set > of commands. These will need sensible names of some sort. Below I've chosen > \symbf, etc., which doesn't look too bad to me. By 'proper' here I assume you mean 'with attached mathematical meaning'? I think it's fair to say that the LaTeX standard \mathbf does produce bold symbols, and in the common case of matching text and maths fonts the symbols also look 'right'. -- Joseph Wright