Re: Unicode and math symbols

["Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>]

On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:

> 
>    On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Berthold K.P. Horn wrote:
> 
>    > But nobody is heeding that avise!  Applications in Windows NT *are*
>    > using them.  And I would not be suprised if they were put in after
>    > arm twisting from the `Seattle Satans' as Sebastain refers to them.
> 
>    No, no. fi and fl are in Mac fonts, too. Some are definitely due
>    to MS, but it's not fair to blame MS for all of them.
> 
> You get the polarity wrong: I think it is a *good* thing they are in there :)

I got the polarity correct, because *I* don't think it's a good thing.


> And yes, just about all 30,000 fonts in Type 1 format have fi and fl.

Nothing bad about that. Any good font should have these ligatures,
and a few more. But it shouldn't matter which number they have,
you should be able to send "f","i" to the font and it should
do the substitution on its own.


> Even the ones on Windows.  Only you can't use them in Windows unless
> you have an application that can reencode them on the fly (like DVIWindo :), 
> but they are there in the font.  Even the TrueType fonts MicroSoft supplies
> with Windows have these glyphs.  And you can easily get at them in NT,
> even NT 3.51.

But a user shouldn't type then in as ligatures. He/she won't in TeX.
This is a TeX forum, and we shouldn't get too distracted by low
quality stuff.


> You miss my point. I don't care where you put them.  The point is that if
> everyone decides for him or herself where to put them, we will have a mess.
> If the UNICODE consortium decides it may be a mess, but everyone
> will be dealing with the *same* mess.

Unicode decided to set apart an area to mess around with, but to
have the rest clean. This doesn't give you a licence to mess
around everywhere.

Regards,	Martin.