From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Tue May 31 2005 - 06:07:35 CDT
At 11:12 +0200 2005/05/31, Jörg Knappen wrote:
>On Sat, 14 May 2005, Murray Sargent wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>I once surveyed the usage of different kinds of greek in math and physics
>(and had a talk about this on EuroTeX 1992 in Prague). I encountered
>italic sans serif greek letters (for tensors) in one journal, this journal
>was >>Il nouvo cimento<<.
Wasn't it discussed in the LaTeX List an
engineering standard for tensors, perhaps even
ISO? I recall that it conflicted with the usage
in pure math. Can any tell if called for
sans-serif tensors?
The principle for adding math characters, though
is that it is required for proper semantic
expressions. I doubt pure math texts use serifs
and sans-serif side-by-side to express semantic
differences. I think that all the TeX fonts
commonly used in math have serifs, and they do
not have all the serif Greek variations that
Unicode already has. But past practise, was
limited by availability, so one cannot look too
much on that.
But one could perhaps argue that this sans-serif
practise is used by engineers, and in some way
makes up a different script, and therefore it
should be there. This is a way of rationalizing
what is already in the Unicode character set. If
the engineers feel about it in this way, perhaps
the Greek sans-serif plain letters should be
added, in addition to the bold one already there.
Then, tying it up with the above engineering
tensor standard, it will no longer conflict with
pure math conventions.
I should perhaps add that I feel that the
sans-serif forms are unnecessary for semantically
expressing pure math (just as the monospace
ones). So it is really a question of what others
who may use them feel about it.
-- Hans Aberg
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