Susan, I think your understanding is correct. And in my Nemeth math braille implementation, I use hexadecimal codes for the Unicode math symbols that Nemeth's rules for character braille sequences don't seem to address. For reference, I've attached my table for Unicode math symbols in Nemeth and UEB. The table doesn't include the Unicode math alphanumerics, which are discussed in the post Nemeth Braille Alphanumerics and Unicode Math Alphanumerics<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/nemeth-braille-alphanumerics-and-unicode-math-alphanumerics>. Please let me know if you have any additions or corrections to the table.
Thanks,
Murray
-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Jolly <easjolly@ix.netcom.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2021 7:09 PM
To: 'Deyan Ginev' <deyan.ginev@gmail.com>
Cc: 'Neil Soiffer' <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>; 'David Farmer' <farmer@aimath.org>; 'Sam Dooley' <samdooley64@gmail.com>; 'Hammond, William F' <whammond@albany.edu>; 'Noble, Stephen' <steve.noble@pearson.com>; Murray Sargent <murrays@exchange.microsoft.com>; 'Louis Maher' <ljmaher03@outlook.com>; www-math@w3.org
Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] Some braille references
Hi Deyan,
I'm confused by what you wrote. My understanding of Unicode is that it distinguishes characters from glyphs and that a great deal of effort has gone into creating the Unicode set of over 100,000 unique characters.
Characters in Unicode are distinguished by their numerical character codes, not by their visual appearance. Unicode decided back in 1993 that a colon punctuation mark and the mathematical symbol for ratio are two different characters. If my understanding up to this point is incorrect, please correct me.
It is also my understanding that characters are displayed visually by glyphs with the Unicode tables providing a typical or reference glyph for each character. However the visual appearance of a given character is not going to be identical in all fonts.
The use of Unicode character codes aids in the automatic translation of math to braille. Of course a given braille system cannot define easy-to-remember braille symbols for all of the Unicode characters so it needs some method for dealing with this issue. One posssibility is direct representation of hexidecimal character codes.
Susan J.