# Re: on upright lowercase greek

• To: math-font-discuss%cogs.susx.ac.uk@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
• Subject: Re: on upright lowercase greek
• From: Ulrik Vieth <vieth@thphy.uni-duesseldorf.de>
• Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 14:22:37 +0200

Thierry Bouche:

>> (similar to upright d for differentials), upright pi
>> for the mathematical constant (similar to upright e and upright i).

> we discussed these issues somewhere else, it appeared that -- at least
> in France -- there is an official  norm precising that e, i & d should
> be set in italic!

> What is the consensus on national traditions': to have a generic
> encoding, and have different fonts according to different usages? or
> do you think they simply should vanish in favor of a unique
> debabelized maths convention?

Well, there are ISO standards for the fields of engineering (see for
example Claudio Beccari's detailed article in one of the recent
TUGboat issues) and there are the IUPAP recommendations'' for the
field of physics.  I suppose a physics or engineering journal intended
for an international audience should better follow these, regardless
of national traditions.  If no such an international standards apply
for a specific field (is there anything for math?), then an author

In the end, it all boils down to the following requirements:

* the font encoding must include a sufficiently rich symbol
complement to be able to support various styles.

* the mark-up of a document should be generic enough to be able
to switch between different conventions behind the scenes.

Thus, for example, if an author writes $\vec{v}$ or $\tens{T}$, one
might easily switch the representation of these tags between arrow
accents of bold math italics or bold sans serif italic.  If an author
just writes $\boldsymbol{v}$ or $\mathsfb{T}$, things are getting
difficult.  The same, of course, applies for the upright d, e, i, etc.
If there are markup tags like \d, \e, \i in math mode, which would
allow to encode the special meaning without losing much of the
readability, one could easily leave it to the publishers style,
whether or not to make them upright or italics.

Cheers, Ulrik.

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