Re: Proprietary Card Decks

From: Hans Aberg (haberg-1@telia.com)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2011 - 10:29:54 CDT

  • Next message: Julian Bradfield: "Re: Proprietary Card Decks"

    On 13 Apr 2011, at 16:42, 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.

    One might typeset variables in italic, constants in upright, so bold italic would be there in support of that. In the older past, one might substitute upright bold.

    >>>> 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".

    So do you want to add every math style used now and in the future, in effect, every font ever used, as a new semantic style in Unicode? That is not practical.

    If not, what principle would restrict it?

    Hans

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