Re: Proprietary Card Decks

From: Julian Bradfield (jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2011 - 09:42:02 CDT

  • Next message: Hans Aberg: "Re: Proprietary Card Decks"

    Hans Aberg <haberg-1@telia.com> wrote:
    >On 13 Apr 2011, at 15:28, Julian Bradfield wrote:
    >> Bold italic has been used for quite a long time.
    >
    >I think it had been not used but not very common in the days of led
    >typesetting.

    I'd agree it was not very common. If I recall, it was about when I was
    at school that the use of bold italic for vector variables became a
    normative standard.

    >>> So that was the rationale for not adding the Calligraphic style, as
    >>> it was thought of a variation of the Script style, one would normally
    >>> use when available. That is, math text would not use them
    >>> side-by-side even though in principle they could do it.
    >>
    >> But math text does use the two side by side with different meanings.
    >>
    >> See
    >> http://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.0434v2
    >> (third line of the abstract)
    >> for a concrete example by working mathematicians.
    >
    >Another question would be if it is necessary for expressing the
    >semantics of the paper, that is, their usage is so locked down that
    >it would be hard to not rewrite it.

    That, if I may say so, is a rather silly question, and also
    irrelevant. It's silly because no one mathematical notation is
    necessary - there's always another way to do it. For example, in
    school texts, and even in some monographs, you may see "bold" letters
    marked with the manuscript sign of under-tilde, instead of or as well
    as actually being bold. It's irrelevant, because it is not the
    business of Unicode to tell mathematicians what they should or should
    not do, any more than it is the business of Unicode to tell Swedes
    that they can just write "aa" instead of "å", or Germans that they can
    just write "ae" instead of "ä".

    -- 
    The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
    Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 13 2011 - 09:44:33 CDT