RE: Mathematical Greek Alphanumeric Symbols

From: Murray Sargent (murrays@exchange.microsoft.com)
Date: Sat May 14 2005 - 15:51:36 CDT

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    The STIX committee (see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr25/ for
    references) chose the sets of mathematical alphanumerics. I agree with
    you that sans-serif characters in general are rarely used in
    mathematics, at least in the mathematics of physics. My guess is that
    the STIX committee didn't find enough mathematical usage for sans-serif
    upright and italic Greek characters to justify including them. One can
    always resort back to higher-level character formatting to render such
    characters, but then the sans-serif distinction is lost on export to
    plain text. Such loss would imply a change in semantics. But so far,
    anyhow, we haven't seen a need for mathematical sans-serif and
    sans-serif italic Greek sets.

    Murray

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
    Behalf Of Hans Aberg
    Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2005 5:37 AM
    To: Unicode List
    Subject: Mathematical Greek Alphanumeric Symbols

    The Greek letters, relative the Latin ones, in the Mathematical
    Alphanumeric Symbols, seem incomplete. The Latin letters exist in the
    following forms:
       <none>
       MATHEMATICAL BOLD
       MATHEMATICAL ITALIC
       MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF ITALIC
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC
    whereas the Greek letters only have
       <none>
       MATHEMATICAL BOLD
       MATHEMATICAL ITALIC
       MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC
    apparently missing the forms:
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF
       MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF ITALIC

    I should say that in traditional math, I think that that only the
    following forms are necessary:
       <none>
       MATHEMATICAL BOLD
       MATHEMATICAL ITALIC
       MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC
    all traditionally typeset having serifs. One possible pure math usage
    might be that non-ITALIC (i.e., not slanted) forms are used for
    constants, ITALIC forms for variables; BOLD forms to indicate
    multi-component forms (such as vectors), as opposed to the non-bold
    single component objects. There is no point to discuss the very varied
    actual math usage here, which depends on tradition which in its turn
    depends on pats availability of glyphs, and different communities, such
    as engineers, would do it differently, different groups having
    incompatible practises.

    But it means that all forms needed in math already are present, but the
    Latin letters got some extra forms that are seemingly absent in the
    Greek forms. 

    -- 
   Hans Aberg

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