# Mathematica symbols

• To: math-font-discuss@cogs.susx.ac.uk
• Subject: Mathematica symbols
• From: Ulrik Vieth <vieth@thphy.uni-duesseldorf.de>
• Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 14:00:08 +0200


During the last few days, I've been further investigating the
Mathematica symbols fonts and I've been working on a mathptm-like
implementation of the old math font encodings to get a better view
of what is actually available for use in the new font encodings.

in the Mathematica 3.0 online manual, I've noticed a couple of
interesting points:

* Mathematica has different symbols for Cross' and Times'.
Both look like a cross, but one of them is a little smaller
and is assigned a different function.  TeX doesn't make
this distinction and reserves only one slot for \times'.
Do we need another one?

* Mathematica has different symbols for And' and Wedge' and
for Or' and Vee'.  The Wedge' and Vee' symbols are a little
smaller than And' and Or' and don't have a predefined meaning
as a function (only a syntactic meaning as a binary operator).
Again, TeX treats both as the same and just assigns different
names to the same symbol.  Do we need two more slots?

* Mathematica has three different sets of single and double
vertical bars, for use as left or right delimiters or as vertical
separator in between symbols.  The extension font Math2 contains
3 sets of 4 sizes each, but they all share the same extension
module.  I guess we can avoid this case in TeX since the symbols
all look the same and the spacing could be handled by different
methods, or am I missing something?

Opinions?

Cheers, Ulrik.

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