# Re: Binary Relations, draft 1

• To: math-font-discuss@cogs.susx.ac.uk
• Subject: Re: Binary Relations, draft 1
• From: Hans Aberg <haberg@matematik.su.se>
• Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 15:37:43 +0100
• Content-Length: 1577

```At 22:58 +0100 1998/11/15, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
>>>>>> "MI" == MicroPress Inc <support@micropress-inc.com> writes:
> MI> 2.      Chars like \includeequal (176 for example):
> MI>         perhaps the line should be shorter than the "\include" part?
>
>Will experiment.

It seems that this in print is often equal to the full length if the
\include part. The main point though is that it looks good from the
graphical point of view (from the mathematical point of view, I do not
think it makes a difference).

> MI> 4.      What are you going to do when you run out of math families (16!)?
>
>Panic!
>
>Seriously, there are 15 families I can use, so that should be enough.
>And the current layout is not at all final. We might move about half
>of the characters out to "special purpose" fonts (as we have now in
>TeX, where the wasy2 and stmaryrd fonts fill this role).

I think that the blackboard bold characters should be added to Unicode, for
the reason that they are used in mathematics as symbols with semantic
meaning, and not as a special style font. For example, it is pretty much
standard to use blackboard bold R, Z denoting the sets of reals and
integers, and it is becoming to be more common to use say blackboard bold
small letters to denote certain fixed objects (such as blackboard bold i,
j, k to denote the imaginary units in quaternions).

Hans Aberg
* Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>