[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [m17n-list] math unicode
From: |
Urs Holzer |
Subject: |
Re: [m17n-list] math unicode |
Date: |
Thu, 1 Nov 2012 23:00:49 +0100 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.13.7 (Linux/3.2.0-3-amd64; KDE/4.8.4; x86_64; ; ) |
विश्वासो वासुकेयः (Vishvas Vasuki) wrote:
> [...] The lack of an easy way (not requiring a
> markup language) to specify superscripts and subscripts is sad - If
> there were unicode-characters like: START_SUPERSCRIPT,
> END_SUPERSCRIPT and so on, one wouldnt have to rely on html-like
> syntax. What do you think? Let's take this offline if you might be
> interested in pushing for its inclusion in the unicode standard..
(Posting to mailing list, since this could interest everyone. And see
last paragraph.)
I think this is not a good idea for two reasons:
1. I don't know much about Unicode, but in my opinion, reading and
writing Unicode should be kept as simple as possible. After all, basic
text editors should be able to handle Unicode completely and entirely.
With START/END characters, you are able to encode a whole tree-
structure. This would open the possibility that START/END characters do
not match. It would mean that text editors would have keep track of
them. They would have to look back in a file and count all the START/END
characters up to the point the user wants to edit. I firmly believe that
text is not a tree. I consider super- and subscripts not to be text but
instead rules how to lay out text on a surface. This is what markup is
for.
2. Superscripts and subscripts are far more complicated in mathematics
than you might think. First they are attached to whole expressions, not
only to a single character (e.g. (a+b)^2 is attached to the expression
(a+b) as a whole). There are upper and lower scripts before as well as
after an expression. Multiple superscripts are not unusual. I even bet
that there are many stylistic differences employed for superscripts in
various books. It should be possible to use styling rules for every
script independently. This whole complexity means that we are basically
stuck with markup.
I admit that MathML is very verbose. If you want to keep your sanity,
you are adviced to use a MathML editor. Another possibility is two write
LaTeX or some other less verbose markup and then run it through a
converter. MathML's advantage is that it explicitely encodes the
structure of a formula. This information is essential for displaying,
converting to speech, copy-pasting into other applications, and also for
styling.
A completely different idea (but rather a hack) is to let m17n expand
some special key combinations to MathML tags (#s for "<msub>", !s for
"</msub>", #S for "<msup>", !S for "</msup>" or whatever).
Sorry for the rather long answer.
Greetings
Urs