RE: Symbols for chemical bonds

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu Mar 31 2005 - 12:18:12 CST

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    At 09:29 AM 3/31/2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
    >There are two or three problems with this:
    >
    >1. It is illogical to use characters with fairly definite semantics
    > for something completely different. I haven't studied how well the
    > defined properties of the four characters mentioned actually
    > suit their use as bond symbols, but if they do, that's a coincidence.

    In the early attempts of mapping SGML entities to Unicode you find a
    lot of 'visual' mapping, where some low-resolution bit-map rendition
    of an SGML entity set is used for visual comparison to the Unicode Standard.

    For Math, it took a concerted effort to recover from the willy/nilly
    over-unifications introduced by that approach. Technical symbols are not
    like punctuation. The shape of the former is their semantic and their
    range of glyphic variation across fonts is constrained differently
    than that of the latter.

    A./



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