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              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Mon, 14 Apr 1997 01:31:35 +0200
From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: math fonts, etc
Status: R

At 23:45 97-04-13, Frank Mittelbach wrote:

>Hans Aberg writes:
...
> >   I will indicate two such possible extensions:
> >
> >   Frank Mittlebach writes:
> >
> > >we should get of the next hill and that is:
> > >
> > >  take the euler math fonts and implement them as well
> >
> >   The discussions revealed that both the AMS-fonts Euler script and TeX
> > calligraphic are a little too restricted for actual math use, as they do
>
>well, restricted or not this is right now what a few million papers do
>use :-) anyway, if you look closely at the draft proposal (p33) then
>you see that MSP contains a full upper and lowercase script/cal
>alphabet

  In fact, one can write mathematical manucripts using only a typewriter,
and in fact some very good mathematicians do (or did) just that. So what
people actually do use and get along with is not a good indicator for what
to include in a typesetting program of the future.

  So why not add bold/bold-slanted versions of those script fonts then,
regardless whether the stuff ends up in the AMS-fonts or whatever? If this
works for a first working wersion of the proposal, it is probably no match
adding a more scripty font in the final proposal.

  It would be nice to add a lower-case blackboardbold letters too (these
are in AMS-fonts).

>but all this works only (and we do only see additional problems) if we
>do take the proposal face value (for the moment) and get it to work,
>rather than having all the discussions that preluded it once more
>(including overlooking all type of different requirements and
>restrictions with TeX and ... and then noticing them again ...) and
>then stop again (perhaps with a slightly different proposal but) more
>or less at the same point ie without anything to test and play with.
>
>once we have gained that experience i think going back once more to
>the drawing board might be fruitful

  If the idea is to try out how the current work, it would perhaps be good
idea putting in an extensible arrows package. This sounds like a rather
conservative addition to me. :-)

  LaTeX already do have some arrows, but these are to restricitve to be
able to typeset many types of commutative diagrams, for example.
Commutative diagrams are a standard in mathematics in a different way today
than when the first versions of TeX and LaTeX first came, and it would be
good allowing such core mathematics to be conveniently typeset.

>give those guys who had their hands in this proposal the benefit of
>doubt that they do actually understand those three issues that i
>enumerated above --- they do

  Actually, I am not sure if the proposal would need to changed or not, as
far as the encoding stuff is concerned.

  However, I felt one should look it over and make sure it need not be
changed by such things that people want to develop complete sets of fonts
(with the bold/leaning/bold-leaning versions bundled to the plain shape).

  The reason is this upright-for-constants-leaning-for-nonconstants
principle, that seems to not have been explicitly brought up before.

  Hans Aberg