From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Mon Nov 13 2006 - 09:08:32 CST
On 13 Nov 2006, at 14:47, Adam Twardoch wrote:
>
> > There are the Computer Modern and AMSFonts in PostScript Outline
> Form available at <http://www.ams.org/tex/>, developed by Blue Sky
> Research and Y&Y. I wonder what it might take to make Unicode fonts
> out of these - there is probably some xopyright issue involved. But
> these fonts produce very good math results, and it seems
> unnecessary work to develop a wholly new fonts.
>
> First of all, I don’t agree with the thesis that since existing
> fonts provide "very good" results, there is no need to develop new
> fonts. Both Computer Modern and the AMS fonts are heavily flawed
> and have some serious typographic problems. In general, CM is not
> really very suitable for offset printing (since it is too thin),
> the quality of diacritic characters is very questionable etc.
I am only addressing it from the mathematicians point of view, were
one wants something looking good enough for expressing the correct math.
> Also, these fonts, just like the AMS fonts, lack many characters,
> for example properly drawn Cyrillic. Typesetting math mixed with
> English may be fine with them, but if you’re trying to typeset even
> just Czech, not mentioning Russian or Greek, you run into problems
> (mostly, the Greek characters in those fonts are optimized for
> math, not for Greek text).
In particular, I only write math in English, though I imagine, there
must be someone somewhere out there using a different language. :-)
> As many of you know, typesetting mathematics is more complicated
> than setting regular text. Just providing some glyphs in the SMP is
> not enough.
>
> Cambria Math is a font that includes a special OpenType table
> ("MATH") that defines the relationships between different glyphs
> used in typesetting mathematics. Microsoft is planning to release
> the specification for the mathematical OpenType extensions along
> with some tools in near future. It is also likely that XeTeX will
> be the first TeX system that will be able to use the Unicode/
> OpenType mathematical fonts.
>
> I personally think that investing the effort of developing a font
> with just the mathematical glyphs defined in the Unicode standard
> included, without the OpenType math-specific extensions that will
> allow the font to work in Office 2007 and XeTeX (for example), kind
> of misses the point.
>
> Microsoft’s Murray Sargent has been writing about this recently:
>
> http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/
>
> You can contact him for more information on the subject.
Actually, I came across the link. It seems to contain a good idea,
namely, an language using ASCII for inputting Unicode.
For more complex math, one needs something corresponding to a macro
system; perhaps some lambda calculus may be used here, as a macro
system quickly becomes rather crippling. In addition, I think an
analysis of the math (human, natural) language is needed, to one can
have develop a semantically correct syntax. I do not pretend this
will come easy. :-)
Hans Aberg
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