Fwd: New Math Symbols

[Ulrik Vieth]

Hi folks,

The following "Call for new symbols" came in a newsletter from
PCTeX today. While I do not want to discuss the specifics here,
it raises an interesting point which may be of general interest:

What is a reasonable subset of commonly used math symbols, given
that different families of math fonts (traditional or OpenType)
provide different subsets of math symbols (traditional or Unicode).

While a generic macro package such as "unicode-math" may define
control sequences for all of the symbols defined in Unicode,
some of them or even many of them will be missing in most fonts.

Would it be helpful to define a minimum set of commonn symbols?
Would it be helpful to define different "profiles" of symbols?
Just some food for thought.

Regards, Ulrik.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: New Math Symbols; LaTeX Quick Start
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:03:24 -0400
From: PCTeX <announ...@pctex.com>

Call for new symbols for the MathTime Pro fonts

Michael Spivak, the designer of MathTime Professional fonts, is
planning to add new symbols to the MathTime Professional 2 (MTPro2)
fonts, and would like user input. He writes:

We are now soliciting suggestions for additional symbols to be
added to the MTPro2 fonts.

Opening Pandora's box in this way will probably lead to so many
requested symbols that they will have to be prioritized, so at
some point we will probably need some sort of vote. Of course,
you might want to point out that "everybody" in XYZ theory uses
the following 13 symbols, so they really just have to be added!

Please do not say "just make all the symbols in STIX", because
there are some symbols there that no one even knows the use of!
Just say which symbols from STIX you do want. (We have already
had requests for many symbols that don't appear in STIX.)

If a large number of requests have been made by the end of the
year, we will try to have a list of them for distribution at the
Joint Math meeting in New Orleans in January of 2011, where people
can lobby for their favorites and add new candidates.

To submit a request, use the forum at
http://forums.pctex.com/viewforum.php?f=11

For a list of STIX font characters, see http://www.stixfonts.org/

For a list of the symbols in the current version of MathTime Pro fonts
see http://pctex.com/files/managed/5/52/MTP2flyerFontList.pdf and for
general information see http://pctex.com/mtpro2.html

[Chris Rowley]

My fisrt thought is: not YASfS! We already have Unicode and STIX.

To be more precise, this is the really worrying bit:

We have already had requests for many symbols that don't appear in
STIX.

Subsets of some Universal Standard are fine but having more than one
Universe
presents problems that are too large for the relatively small number
of obscure
symbols each uniquely covers.

Here I am not arguing that the slowly evolving Unicode Standard should
be this
Universal Standard, ratrher something like this:

-- for characters it could be something like Unicode PLUS a 'Unicode
Potential' list,
well maintained and moderated by established experts (with a majority
non-commercial!!),
so that it has some standing in the relevant communities;

-- for glyphs ... well, as ever, the relationship between characters
and glyphs is a minefield
and should probably not be standardised, so maybe things such as
variant glyphs and the evolution
(speciation) of variants into distinct characters should be in the
form of a moderated commentary
(plus a wiki-like forum for external ideas).

Cheers, chris

> To submit a request, use the forum athttp://forums.pctex.com/viewforum.php?f=11
>
> For a list of STIX font characters, seehttp://www.stixfonts.org/