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Date:         Tue, 20 May 2014 08:40:53 +0100
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From: Joseph Wright <joseph.wright@MORNINGSTAR2.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: Unicode math
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Status: R

Hello Will,

A few questions from me. One 'up front': where does \mathrm fit in to
all of this?

On 20/05/2014 03:09, Will Robertson wrote:
> The \mathbf command in particular has been abused in physics to denote
> vectors and matrices, such as \mathbf{B} for magnetic field. I suspect the
> situation is similar for sans math, with tensors using sans on occasion but
> no doubt in other contexts used for multi-letter identifiers. (Examples
> more than welcome; in fact, requested.)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'abused' here: there isn't an
obvious alternative to this, particularly if we bear in mind that the
design here pre-dates Unicode by a long way.

> In contrast, Unicode math defines a number of alphabets in a single Unicode
> font, including mathematical italic and bold mathematical italic and many
> more variations. In OpenType maths fonts to date, these symbols are all
> designed as single-letter identifiers and not to be used for strings of
> characters such as "Re" in italic or "Set" in bold.

To be clear, the Unicode position is that e.g. bold-B for magnetic field
should not come from the 'bold' font but from the bold-symbols part of a
single maths font: correct? That being the case, have the Unicode people
considered at all multi-letter identifiers or has this simply been
missed at present? (Anyone on the list sufficiently well-informed about
this?)

> 1. \mathbf and friends go back to simply selecting a text font. Note that
> they still need to remap \mathcode{}s in this case because normal unicode
> math glyphs exist all the way up in Plane 1 where text fonts daren't to
> tread.

[snip]

> 3. To get proper bold symbols, including Greek, we'll need a whole new set
> of commands. These will need sensible names of some sort. Below I've chosen
> \symbf, etc., which doesn't look too bad to me.
By 'proper' here I assume you mean 'with attached mathematical meaning'?
I think it's fair to say that the LaTeX standard \mathbf does produce
bold symbols, and in the common case of matching text and maths fonts
the symbols also look 'right'.
--
Joseph Wright