Re: mover vs latin chars with diacriticals

Neil Soiffer wrote:
>
> The Unicode blocks Latin Extended A, B, and Additional contain roman
characters
> with various diacritical marks.  Eg, U+1E8B is "Latin small letter x
with dot above"
> and is equivalent to "x" with the combining character U+0307.
>
> I thought the MathML spec said that using <mover> was preferable to
using these
> characters, but I didn't find anything.  This issue came up when looking
at the output
> of a program -- sometimes it used characters in the Latin blocks and
sometimes it
> used <mover>.  Dealing with multiple forms increases the complexity of most
> programs that process the MathML.

Agree! Also applies to <munder>!

> If the spec is currently silent on this (maybe I missed where it talked
about it), do
> people think that the spec should recommend one form over the other?  If
so which
> form?  [In case it is not obvious, I think <mover> should be recommended
in the
> spec]

I have not studied this in detail and cannot offer assistance. I just can
both remark that STIX project is using diacritical Unicode marks and cite
others know more than me.

I think that international standard (diacritical marks) may be preferable
over MathML (which is not standard, just a w3c recommendation).

-------

[http://www.geocities.com/chavchan/userjs/support.xml]

Support for MathML 2.0 Presentational Markup

“[...] for better quality unicode based solutions (combining diacritical
marks or existing precomposed glyphs) may be used instead.”

-------

[http://www.geocities.com/chavchan/userjs/support.xml]

Support for ANSI/NISO/ISO-12083 Mathematics DTD

“Overscripts should not be used to produce accents, Unicode based
solutions (either combining diacritical marks, or precomposed characters)
 are preferable in this case.”

-------

[http://canonicalscience.blogspot.com/2006/02/choosing-notationsyntax-for-canonmath.html]

“vi. Good point.
But in case of accents (over dots, tildes, hats) I would encourage usage
of Unicode combining diacritical marks that provide
language neutral mechanism for adding accents. It takes into account font
metrics and allows to add several accents to any character. Also it is not
properly supported by current browsers.”

> Neil Soiffer
> Senior Scientist
> Design Science, Inc.
> www.dessci.com
> ~ Makers of Equation Editor, MathType, MathPlayer and MathFlow ~
>

Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Friday, 28 April 2006 09:02:28 UTC