WebMath: Re: math font

[Douglas Butler]

To: "Robert Miner" <RobertM at dessci.com>

Thanks for your various contributions about math characters.

Your colleague Bob Matthews knows me, and knows my graphing program Autograph.
It strikes me that you may be able to help with a problem we are encountering in our attempts to get Autograph to run on Chinese Windows, and other picture language operating systems.

These systems do not permit the use of bit-map fonts for dialogue boxes, and we are therefore looking for a way to adapt Arial by adding about a dozen special characters for the particular symbols we use in Autograph.

Do you know of a good font designer who can deliver Aria performance down to 8pt, and add in the extra characters - affordably??  Perhaps Design Science has its own font designers?

I hope you can help.
With best wishes
Douglas

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Douglas Butler  debutler at argonet.co.uk
iCT Training Centre (Oundle School), PO Box 46, Oundle PE8 4JX, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1832 273444  Fax: +44 (0)1832 272760  Mob: 07718 319903
www.argonet.co.uk/oundlesch  Autograph: www.autograph-maths.com
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Miner" <RobertM at dessci.com>
To: <debutler at argonet.co.uk>
Cc: <webmath at camel.math.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 8:04 AM
Subject: Re: WebMath: standard notation for negative numbers? ALT 0150


> 
> 
> Hi.
> 
> You wrote:
> 
> > Not so - ANY font has a proper minus sign (en-dash) which can be inserted
> > anywhere as ALT 0150  eg ñx (better than -x), though the distinction will
> > only be seen in this email if you are running in formatted text.
> 
> I disagree on a technicality.  en-dash is en-dash. The unicode point
> for MINUS in x2212.  You can use an en-dash, but in my view, that is
> faking it.
> 
> I concede that it sounds like using en-dash works pretty well though,
> since as you say, en-dash is in pretty much any font that covers
> ISO-LATIN-1, and usually looks the way you want.  I don't actually
> object to "faking it" in the least, but I want to clarify the purist
> viewpoint
> 
> > Likewise ALT 1076 for 45ƒ, and ALT 0178 for x¾, and ALT 0179 for x„
> 
> I like the ALT trick too.  But note that that behavior is tied to
> the authoring tool.  Not all authoring tools support it.
> 
> > VERY annoying that IE6 does not recognise the Unicode font extensions -
> > that single advance would solve 50% of MATH notation problems on the Web,
> > ie all math expressions that can be written as a single line of
> > text.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by this.  Windows in general, and IE in
> particular do have pretty good Unicode support, at least in my
> experience.  What is lacking is Unicode encodings for fonts.  All
> older fonts and most new ones use a different encoding scheme.  So if
> you ask a random font for the glyph in slot x2212, you usually get
> junk.
> 
> As an illustration, here are two snippets on HTML code where the code
> points for hyphe en-dash and MINUS are hard coded as numerical escape
> sequences. The first displays fine for me, since Lucida Sans Unicode
> is one of the few widely distributed fonts with a Unicode encoding.
> Note that the Lucida designers have made hypen and en-dash very
> similar, but MINUS still looks like a minus sign.
> 
> However, in the second example, the first two come out fine, but the
> third code point is a little bullet thing.  This is because Times in
> not a Unicode-encoded font.
> 
> <div style="font-family: Lucida Sans Unicode">
> Here is a hyphen &#45; and an en-dash &#150; and a minus &#x2212;
> </div>
> 
> <div style="font-family: Times">
> Here is a hyphen &#45; and an en-dash &#150; and a minus &#x2212;
> </div>
> 
> 
> --Robert
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Robert Miner                                    RobertM at dessci.com
> MathML 2.0 Specification Co-editor                    651-223-2883
> Design Science, Inc.   "How Science Communicates"   www.dessci.com
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