Symbols for chemical bonds

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sun Mar 27 2005 - 07:18:48 CST

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    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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