From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sun Mar 27 2005 - 07:18:48 CST
Which Unicode characters would be most suitable as symbols for chemical
bonds? By visual appearance, one might think about using
- em dash (or en dash) for single bond
- equals sign for double bond
- identical to for triple bond
- strictly equivalent to for quadruple bond
but these would differ quite a lot from the usual semantics of the
characters (except for the em dash, which is rather general-purpose
anyway). Besides, there would hardly be any guarantee that all the glyphs
would be of the same width in a given font.
I found the document "Elsevier Science Grid in Unicode",
http://support.sciencedirect.com/sgml/dtd50/esgrid.pdf
which discusses the mapping of a large number of symbols
to Unicode characters, and it contains no Unicode equivalents
for the bond symbols.
Since bond symbols are often used in chemical formulas inside texts, it
would seem natural to encode them as characters.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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