Re: mathvariant vs. plane 1

Paul Libbrecht wrote:
> There was a discussion about this topic a bit in April on the 
> tex@lists.river-valley.com mailing list.
> Can't reach the archive.
> 
> It would be my naive interpretation that browsers should do the exact 
> same thing if either you successfully use the plane-1 character or the 
> character with the variant.
> Unfortunately, it looks like the specification could not be fully 
> detailed about that because plane-1 doesn't have all (fortunately?):
>   http://www.w3.org/Math/Group/draft-spec/chapter7.html#chars.BMP-SMP
> so it just says it "should" be equivalent.

Yes, that's a side issue about using Plane 1:
the Unicode folks didn't want to define a
2nd codepoint for glyphs that, for whatever reason,
were already defined at other places.
For example, a number of double-struck letters
were already defined for Complex, Numbers, Integers, etc.

Understandable, I suppose, but it certainly
creates headaches!

So, for something like LaTeXML, I would have
to map some combinations of mathvariant + letter
to plane-1, but other random combinations to
places in plane-0 blocks.

For search indexing, you'd likely need to do the
reverse, since people will expect a W to match
a W in any mathvariant or plane-1 block.

> paul
> 
> 
> Le 25-juin-09 à 15:44, Bruce Miller a écrit :
> 
>> I sure would like my Wronskians to be curly!
>> (ie. <mi mathvariant="script">W</mi> )
>> Alas, neither Firefox 3.0 nor Opera 10 support
>> mathvariant="script" (nor bold-script, fraktur,
>> bold-fraktur or double-struck). MathPlayer 2
>> does, however (congratulations! :>)
>>
>> But it gets interesting: all three support
>> the Plane 1 sub-blocks for script, fraktur and
>> double-struck, given appropriate fonts!
>> (alas, still not bold-script, nor bold-fraktur).
>>
>> Just to make it perverse, though, neither MathPlayer
>> nor Opera support most of the other plane 1 sub-blocks
>> (bold, bold-italic, sans-serif ...).
>>
>> So, if we can't solely use mathvariant, nor
>> plane-1..... should we use a hybrid?
>> Ie. Plane-1 chars for script, fraktur & double-struck
>> and mathvariant for the others?
>> (and avoid bold-script, bold-fraktur)
>>
>> Or are there any pending developments that
>> would improve the situation in some of the
>> browsers?
> 


-- 
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 16:31:52 UTC