L2/99-188

DATE: 1999-06-09

DOC TYPE: Expert contribution
TITLE: Proposal to encode mathematical alphanumeric symbols
SOURCE: Murray Sargent III, Barbara Beeton
PROJECT:
STATUS: Proposal
ACTION ID: FYI
DUE DATE: --
DISTRIBUTION: Worldwide
MEDIUM: Paper and html
NO. OF PAGES: 5

 

A. Administrative

1. Title

Proposal to encode mathematical alphanumeric symbols

2. Requester's name

Murray Sargent III, Barbara Beeton

3. Requester type

Expert request.

4. Submission date

1999-6-9

5. Requester’s reference

Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX)

6a. Completion

Complete proposal

6b. More information to be provided?

If requested

 

B. Technical -- General

1a. New script? Name? No.
1b. Addition of characters to existing block? Name? No.
2. Number of characters 14 variants or 1209 new alphanumeric symbols
3. Proposed category  
4. Proposed level of implementation and rationale Much math involves complex shaping, so level 3 is typically required.  Simple expressions could be accomplished at level 1 if plane 1 encoding is used and level 3 if math variant tags are used
5a. Character names included in proposal? 1209 new alphanumeric symbols to be encoded in plane 1. Alternatively 14 variant tags defined in BMP (recommended to reserve a block of 16).
5b. Character names in accordance with guidelines? Yes.
5c. Character shapes reviewable?  
6a. Who will provide computerized font? None needed
6b. Font currently available? None needed
6c. Font format? na
7a. Are references (to other character sets, dictionaries, descriptive texts, etc.) provided? Yes.
7b. Are published examples (such as samples from newspapers, magazines, or other sources) of use of proposed characters attached? Not attached, but available.
8. Does the proposal address other aspects of character data processing? No

 

C. Technical -- Justification

1. Contact with the user community? Yes. Patrick Ion, Barbara Beeton, Murray Sargent III
2. Information on the user community? Professional mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers, and other scientific and technical researchers.
3a. The context of use for the proposed characters? Used in publication of research mathematics and other hard sciences.
3b. Reference

 

4a. Proposed characters in current use? Yes.
4b. Where? Worldwide, by scientific and technical publishers.
5a. Characters should be encoded entirely in BMP? Yes if variant tags are used; else entirely in plane 1.
5b. Rationale Accurate publication of mathematical and scientific research on the Web is impossible without a comprehensive and accurate collection of symbols including various alphabetic variants in common use. Allocation in the BMP is in accordance with the Roadmap for nonalphanumeric symbols.
6. Should characters be kept in a continuous range? Yes if variant tags are used.  Else in standard groups of 32 or 16.
7a. Can the characters be considered a presentation form of an existing character or character sequence? No. A given alphabetic symbol has different semantics when its style is changed and should not be found by the same plain-text search string.
7b. Where?

 

7c. Reference

 

8a. Can any of the characters be considered to be similar (in appearance or function) to an existing character? Yes in that some letterlike symbols look similar to corresponding characters in some alphabets, e.g., some capital script letters.
8b. Where? Letterlike symbols
8c. Reference

 

9a. Combining characters or use of composite sequences included? Yes if variant tags are used
9b. List of composite sequences and their corresponding glyph images provided? A list is provided below, but the corresponding glyphs are well known and are omitted.
10. Characters with any special properties such as control function, etc. included? All the characters are modifier characters, which is a kind of control nature.

 

D. SC2/WG2 Administrative

To be completed by SC2/WG2

1. Relevant SC 2/WG 2 document numbers:

 

2. Status (list of meeting number and corresponding action or disposition)

 

3. Additional contact to user communities, liaison organizations etc.

 

4. Assigned category and assigned priority/time frame

 

Other Comments

 

 


Mathematics has need for a number of Latin and Greek alphabets that on first thought appear to be font variations of one another, e.g., normal, bold, italic and script H.  However in any given document, these characters have distinct mathematical semantics.  For example, a normal H represents a different variable from a bold H, etc.  If one drops these distinctions in plain text, one gets gibberish.  Instead of the well-known Hamiltonian formula

 

            H = òdt(eE² + mH²),

 

you’d get the integral equation (!)

 

H = òdt(eE² + mH²).

 

Accordingly, the STIX project requests adding normal, bold, italic, script, etc., Latin and Greek alphabets.  Straight encoding leads to 1209 characters and loses some useful common information, such as all variants of H might not be trivially recognizable as H’s.  But it does allow plain text to retain the proper character semantics and it allows simple (nonrich) search methods to work.

 

The proposal considers two possible ways to encode mathematical alphabetic symbols in ways that allow simple search algorithms to work.  One encodes them all outright in one of the surrogate planes.  This is the approach the UTC recommended informally in the UTC Meeting 79.  For reference, the other uses “math variant tags”, which act in some ways like nonspacing combining marks.  For example, a math script H would be encoded as H<math script>.  Encountering such a combination, a rendering engine should choose some script font to render the H.  Which script font is beyond the scope of plain text.

 

The alphabetic symbols encountered in mathematics are given in the following table:

 

Math style

Characters

Count

upright (Roman)

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115

italic

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115

bold

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115

bold italic

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115

calligraphic (script)

a-z, A-Z

52

bold calligraphic (script)

a-z, A-Z

52

fraktur

a-z, A-Z

52

open-face

a-z, A-Z, 0-9

62

open-face italic

a-z, A-Z, 0-9

62

sans-serif

a-z, A-Z, 0-9

62

sans-serif italic

a-z, A-Z, 0-9

62

sans-serif bold

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115

sans-serif bold italic

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115

monospace

a-z, A-Z, 0-9, a-w, A-O (Greek)

115


a-w also includes a glyph variant of f, e, and q, since both glyphs for each of these can appear in the same document with different semantics.  In addition there is the partial derivative sign and the upper-case Greek letters have the del Ñ. This gives 24+4 lowercase characters, and 24+1 upper-case Greek characters. 

 

 

Outright Encoding Approach

 

Outright encoding stores the alphabets in plane 1 for a total of 1209 characters as currently entered.  No accented characters are included.  Accented mathematical symbols are always represented by combining character sequences.

 

 

Math Variant Tag Approach

 

Math variant tags could be defined for each of the categories above.  If this approach is used, the tags should have the following properties:

 

  1. no effect at start of line
  2. combining class 255
  3. affect entire previous combining character sequence
  4. only the first of consecutive tags is used (others are ignored)

 

Discussion

 

Rendering mathematics requires a fairly sophisticated 2D layout engine.  Compared to the complexity needed in this engine, handling either math variant tags or surrogate pairs is straightforward.  The outright encoding approach is simpler conceptually, since it doesn’t require any additional rules.  It only requires the ability of the display engine to handle surrogate pairs.  Both approaches require multicode navigation, e.g., the text caret must not end up inside a multicode sequence.  Such navigation is easy to implement if combining-mark sequences are implemented.  Since combining mark sequences are required in mathematics, this navigation shouldn’t be difficult to implement.  Similarly it is anticipated that handling surrogate pairs will be easy, partly because they will be handled by computer operating systems thanks to the strong business case for supporting East Asian characters in plane 2.