Re: [EXTERNAL] Some braille references

Once more, Susan Jolly sent email with an interesting point. She pointed
out something that may look like a semantic difference, but I don't think
really is one, at least as far as we have been considering them. Rather
than paraphrase what Susan said, I'm taking the liberty of quoting her:

The factorial sign, ratio, decimal point, and  the comma separator in
> numbers (or European decimal point) use different Nemeth symbols than do
> the
> exclamation, colon, period, and comma punctuation marks.  There may be
> others I've forgotten.
>
> I guess this could be considered as a semantic distincton but the reason is
> not necessarily semantic.  The problem is of course that  many of the
> dropped numbers used in Nemeth are also used as punctuation marks in
> English
> literary braille. My guess is that Dr Nemeth's use of separate symbols was
> primarily to avoid adding clutter to the math.
>

To maybe add a little more clarification: Nemeth code has different
meanings for some of the standard literary braille symbols including
punctuation symbols, so if you really mean an exclamation mark (as at the
end of sentence) instead of a factorial symbol, you need to encode the two
differently. Basically you need to step out of math mode in these cases.
That will occur in MathML inside of an mtext or embedded HTML.

   Neil