RE: TrueType, PUA and Windows

From: Murray Sargent (murrays@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Nov 29 1999 - 19:22:06 EST


I recommend against using the STIX PUA codes for math characters not yet in
Unicode. These characters are in the process of being standardized in
Unicode, so you'd just have to move things pretty soon now and would have
obsolete documents. To get the ball rolling, use the math characters
already in Unicode. If you can handle them, you're doing an awful lot
already and will have debugged the lion's share of your MathML code.

Thanks
Murray

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Hudson [SMTP:tiro@tiro.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 3:31 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Cc: Unicode List; mozilla-mathml@mozilla.org
> Subject: Re: TrueType, PUA and Windows
>
> At 01:38 PM 29-11-99 -0800, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>
> >Well, the semantics of the character entities are clear. If Mozilla
> >detects fonts on the system that include the various math glyphs and
> >glyph parts, then it will map the document's characters and character
> >entities to font glyphs, not necessarily one-to-one. Mozilla needs to be
> >careful not to let any of the PUA codes "escape" out of the app, e.g.
> >cut/copy/paste, which will probably be done in terms of MathML "source",
> >including character entities, markup and all.
>
> How will Mozilla detect these fonts? If it detects by PUA codepoints in
> the
> CMAP table you are going to run into the problem of detecting fonts in
> which these PUA codepoints have been assigned to completely different
> characters. By definition, the PUA -- and also the corporate use area --
> are not fixed encodings, and custom font developers may already be using
> the STIX PUA codepoints for completely different characters.
>
> We're one of the companies currently reviewing the Scientific and
> Technical
> Information Publishers group's font requirements for the STIX project, and
> I'm beginning to wonder if someone isn't putting the cart before the
> horse.
> I can only see one way in which all this is going to work seamlessly: the
> characters specified by STIPUB need to be assigned standard Unicode values
> before the STIX fonts are developed and before anyone tries to implement
> MathML font support. Even if the PUA encoding approach can be made to work
> without major font problems, someone will have to do the work all over
> again when the characters are properly encoded.
>
> John Hudson
>
> Tiro Typeworks
> Vancouver, BC
> www.tiro.com
> tiro@tiro.com



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