Re: [EXTERNAL] Rendering multi-symbol variable names and OpenType math fonts

Hi all,

I agree this is an issue. In LaTeX I am currently using text fonts for the multi-letter constructions. (Unless I am mistaken my understanding is that there is typically no kerning included for the upright Roman letters in opentype maths fonts.)

Even the fact that operators like “sin” and “cos” need to come from a text font is slightly problematic since it requires the text and maths font to harmonise closely. 

> On 7 Jan 2022, at 08:17, Murray Sargent <murrays@exchange.microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> Interesting question. In my experience as a theoretical physicist, variables are single letters that may be adorned by primes, accents, subscripts and superscripts. Multicharacter function names like “sin” are not italicized. Can you give an example of a multicharacter variable?

In fluid mechanics it’s common to use variables like Re for Reynolds number, St for Stokes number, etc. They are commonly italic but occasionally turn up in an upright style. 

There are similar problems in set theory upright bold multi-letter constructions (“Hom”, “Set”, etc.) where the spacing should be for text so again the opentype math glyphs are not always appropriate. 

I have a few examples of these in my slides (gosh, quite a while ago) here:

https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2015-07-20-wspr-TUG-unicode-math.pdf

My conclusion was that maths requires (at least) upright, italic, and upright bold alphabets with text spacing as well as what is covered by the symbols in Unicode mathematics. 

Cheers,
Will
(From phone)