Re: TeX <-> Unicode mapping

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote on 1999-10-10 19:24 UTC:
> Mathematics is a very greedy symbol user.
> It has always been the case that all symbols that were available
> in the available technology were used for some purpose.

Those of you following the discussions on unicode@unicode.org will
remember that the Unicode consortium is working with typography experts
from various publishers of mathematical literature to extend the math
repertoire for Unicode 4.0. They will add a very comprehensive
collection of around 1000 additional mathematical characters (many of
these glyph variants that mathematicians would consider to be different
symbols), however most of them will be in Plane 1 (along with other
special purpose scientific characters and scripts).

> Instead, we should view Unicode as a system that helps writing
> natural language. Not as a system for doing mathematics.
> It will fail anyway - Unicode describes one-dimensional things
> mathematical formulas are two-dimensional.

Unicode subsets will be widely used to identify the symbols inside these
two-dimensional things. Unicode is not a method for encoding
mathematical notation, but it forms an important namespace of symbols
within such an encoding method.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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