From: Kirill Smelkov (kirr@landau.phys.spbu.ru)
Date: Sat Jun 28 2008 - 07:19:22 CDT
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 09:30:58AM +0200, Ondrej Certik wrote:
> Hi,
>
> first thanks Xun, Phillips, Johannes, Kent and Asmus for your
> feedback. My comments are below.
>
> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 9:53 PM, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > On 6/26/2008 11:15 AM, Kent Karlsson wrote:
> > The plain text ones have their uses for quick and dirty footnote symbols and
> > for indicating squared units in otherwise non-mathematical texts as well as
> > similar *simple* usages. Such fallbacks are best limited to single digits of
> > the 8859-1 subset to avoid the surprises you ran into.
> >
> > In addition, as you had noted earlier, the full repertoire of super and
> > subscript characters are the proper choice for phonetic notations (e.g.
> > digits used as tone marks). Such notations require preservation of specific
> > semantics across formatting languages. They require much more extensive
> > Unicode support as well as special fonts, and they wouldn't survive
> > transcoding anyway, meaning the issues you encountered with your examples
> > aren't as relevant in that field of application.
> >
> > A./
> >
> > PS: in the late 90's a request had been forwarded from people maintaining a
> > chemical database to add a small number of additional Greek subscripts. The
> > rationale was that they type of database was not able to handle any markup.
> > The request never went anywhere, for lack of specific input from the
> > submitters beyond an initial discussion, and it is unknown how they solved
> > their problem. The database was intended for regulatory purposes, so one
> > assumes that some solution was found, but there has been no information.
>
>
> For general mathematical formulas, one needs to use TeX or a similar
> system (mathml for example, but the current rendering engines for
> mathml, like in browsers, do not look as good as TeX). Of course we
> support this in sympy, but what I am asking for is to improve the
> experience in the terminal, because you cannot use tex or mathml in
> the terminal (those require a full graphical fronted, like a browser,
> or a windows application)
>
> To give you the idea what I mean, look at these examples:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/sympy/wiki/PrettyPrinting
>
> (especially the screenshots of the terminals at the end). See also
> this thread for the background why we want that:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/sympy/browse_thread/thread/18fbaa3020c390c5
>
> The observation is, that one can take advantage of unicode and print a
> surprisingly lot of formulas in a plain text (terminal) mode. E.g.:
>
> ½∂ᵦφ∂ᵝφ
>
> but as I said, some characters are missing. As I understand, unicode
> still has a lot of free space to add more characters, right? Is there
> some technical problem with it? If not, let's discuss the
> philosophical issues: you can do all superscripts, except "q". I
> understand those could be from historical reasons, but anyway, let's
> just add "q" somewhere and be done with it. Then let's add all missing
> latin letters to subscripts, there are already 8 of them, so let's add
> the rest too. And then the same for greek super and subscripts.
>
> Some of you objected (if I understand) that one should not use sub or
> superscripts, because those are meant only for backward compatibility,
> one should use a markup. Well, as Kent has remarked, it is useful in
> many cases. That's why all the numbers were added. Well, the latin
> (and greek) letters would be *very* useful to math, because you can
> represent tensors easily with it. If there were not latin/greek
> sub/superscripts in unicode, I would understand that. But in the
> present case, where clearly the support is already there, only half
> finished, it seems to me that the best way to go forward is to finish
> the support for all latin/greek sub/superscripts.
I can only second this!
The support for latin super and subscripts is already half-there, so it
would be *very* convenient to have it 100% done.
Markup is good, but a lot of research environment still work in plain
terminal (e.g. like XTerm), so having unicode building blocks is quite
handy.
Look, support for e.g. next is already there in unicode:
∞
⌠
v(t) = ⎮ k(τ - t)*s(τ) dτ, где
⌡
0
-ⅈ*β*z
Ψ₀(z) = C*ℯ
So maybe let's do it 100% and consistent?
> What do you think? If you are not against and agree with me that it
> should be done, I'd like to do the work --- I'd appreciate any
> pointers about what should I do.
> If you don't agree, I'd like to discuss it. :)
I could too try to help.
Thanks beforehand.
--
Всего хорошего, Кирилл.
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