RE: More mathvariants

Hi Robert,

Robert Miner [mailto:RobertM@dessci.com] wrote on 29 April 2003 16:58:
> Hi Simon,
> 
> > The font specification attributes in MathML1 allowed one to 
> specify many
> > more fonts than the mathvariant attribute in MathML2. For 
> example, it is now
> > not possible to specify italic or bold variants of double 
> struck characters.
> > (And if it were possible there would not be corresponding 
> Unicode points.)
> > 
> > Is this based on the STIX research? Typesetters do have 
> such variations
> > available, and I think they use them from time to time. Is 
> there a way to
> > specify such variants? mglyph would not be an ideal 
> alternative, because it
> > hard codes a specific font.
> 
> It was partly on account of STIX, but more directly because of
> requests from the W3C style activity.
> 
> The design of the mathvariant attribute basically corresponds to the
> math alphanumeric characters that STIX requested from Unicode in plane
> 1.  The idea is that these families of symbols frequently carry
> semantic meaning in equations, e.g. fraktur fonts for Lie algebras,
> etc. so the specification of these broad categories of fonts was
> properly part of the markup.  By contrast, just exactly which fraktur
> font a typesetter used was part of the styling, and should thus be
> kept separately from the markup.

My concern is that there may be authors who wish to use both normal and
italic double-struck characters in a single publication with different
semantic meaning. That is now not possible. Our line will be that we will
try to persuade authors to pick their variants from the set provided by
mathml. We will see how far we get with that.

With kind regards,
Simon Pepping
DTD Development and Maintenance
Elsevier
s.pepping@elsevier.com
www.elsevier.com/locate/sgml

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2003 06:35:26 UTC