At 04:12 PM 7/2/99 -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
>I have run into these letters myself in lectures on theoretical computer
>science in Germany. I can assure you that the German handwritten fraktur
>glyphs are to > 99% of all German math and compsci students just as
>alien as say Hebrew or Katakana characters (which at least one of our
>logic professors also used).
As long as there's no distinct use of bold vs. regular katakana, this is
already supported today.
Hebrew is more of an issue. We cloned 3 hebrew characters, since in math
they do not have the same directionality as in Hebrew. If you can provide
us with a pointer to published (printed) material having more than aleph
bet gimel we might have to take a look a them.
>If I see a handwritten fraktur form used by
>a professor on a blackboard and later the printed fraktur version in the
>word processed exam sheets, then I will have great difficulties in
>recognizing them as being the same letter. Fraktur is practically
>unknown among the under 40 year old Germans (including math graduate
C'mon. I'm over your magic age line, but just barely, and use of Fraktur
was still common in some text books and reference works. I still have one
of the latter in my posession, last re-printed in 1976. In Figure 392 it
uses Sütterlin for labeling the unit-vectors u, v and w, and in the text
referring to these vectors the letters are given in Fraktur. The
interesting thing about this particular reference work (and a very popular
one, since it was cheap), is that it was a German translation of a Russian
original.
I also remember that as students we had to all dedicate some time to get
used to all these special alphabets. I.e. we all had to learn the Sütterlin
letters (a,b,c,d,e,i,n, u,v,x,y,z, but not most of the others) as well as
the Greek letters, just as we learned Nabla and a host of other special
symbols in our first year. I personally had read a lot of older books
printed in Fraktur, otherwise I might have had to learn that alphabet as well.
>students) and therefore rather few people could associate the
>handwritten and the printed form with each other. If they are both used,
>then they are perceived as clearly different symbols.
(I just gave the counter example of them being inteded for the same symbol in
publications. You would really screw up people if you encoded these
differently. S. and F. are the handwriting / print equivalents of each
other, it's just so, that nowadays it's so much less common to see figures
done with hand-drawn labels).
>On a more general note, I consider the use of fraktur characters (no
>matter which form) in mathematics to be bad style anyway. Modern
>mathematical notation gets its variety of symbols primarily from the
>Latin and Greek alphabet, combined with numerous combining characters
>(TeX certainly had a lot of influence here).
I would be the last to not agree that much of the use of Fraktur in
beginning math is now beginning to be historic, but there are reasonable
analogies to the encoding of somewhat historic letter forms as well.
> Some mathematics professors
>have made it their mission to impress their students with more and more
>exotic symbols, but this should more be seen as an eccentricity than
>something that helps the reader or that the publishing industry should
>support with a lot of energy.
>
>Exotic glyph variants in character sets have the danger of becoming a
>self-fulfilling prophecy. As soon as they are available, some
>mathematician will consider it to be cool to use them, no matter whether
>this improves communication with the reader or not.
As Jonathan Coxhead would argue, it's not our task to restrict the writers.
A./
>I like the idea of having comprehensive support for established
>mathematical publishing practice in Unicode, but overdoing it just leads
>to abuse of symbols. I hope the people selecting these extensions will
>find a reasonable balance. There are certainly no fields of mathematics
>where one really needs 1000 different symbols in the same context. Try
>to avoid including symbols that can be confused with each other too
>easily, because supporting the wide use of easily confusable symbols
>will not be a great service to your readers of scientific publications.
>
>> | Apart from that, it's still legal to use this form of
>> | handwriting, even though few people use it.
>
>I don't think there are any legal regulations regarding what scripts are
>allowed to be used in Germany. Some of the handwriting from doctors that
>I have seen while I worked in a hospital was hardly describable as
>related to any form of the Latin script. Everything is allowed if just
>the intended recipient (say a pharmacist) is able to read it.
>
>Markus
>
>--
>Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
>Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
>
>
>
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