-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Hecht [mailto:bhecht@dekker.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 3:54 PM
To: 'magda@unicode.org'
Cc: David Dekker; Joanne Jay; Marc Schneider
Subject: Request for information
Dekker, a publisher of scholarly works in the science,
technical & medical fields is about to launch a new web site which will
provide access to all of our current journal content and we will be
adding support for encyclopedia
and book content over time. The content on our site will be delivered
in
either full text or via PDF for print output. The full text will be
dynamically pulled from an XML database and rendered on screen via XSL
style sheets. We are hoping that you can assist us in solving the
problem(s) with the full text rendering part of the application.
Our long term solution is to provide to our users an "STM subset" of the
Unicode character set. We have searched everywhere for a character set
that
resolves the 400-500 characters that we need to properly build both
inline
characters (via character entity references) and display math (via Math
ML).
The Microsoft Ariel Unicode font would be perfect, except that its 13 MB
to
download and about 23 MB to install, which makes it somewhat of a
problem to
provide via the internet. We are hoping we can come up with (or create)
a
character set that encompasses the following code pages:
* Greek Extended 1F00 - 1FFF
* Superscripts and Subscripts 2070 - 209F
* Number Forms 2150 - 218F
* Arrows 2190 - 21FF
* Mathematical Operators 2200 - 22FF
* Miscellaneous Technical 2300 - 23FF
and likely 2 or 3 other sets that we have to evaluate. While some of
our
staff thinks that we should find a way to incorporate Klingon somewhere,
our
management has discouraged this endeavor. Perhaps there is some
licensing
opportunities for a part of the code set that we could investigate.
As a short term fall-back position, we are planning on mapping special
characters that appear inline (within a paragraph) for which there is no
available TrueType font to a graphic image. We recognize that
Unicode.org
has some number of these already created. Is there some way of
licensing
this set of GIFs for use in a commercial endeavor?
I hope you can provide us with some insight into how we may proceed in
both
our short and long term endeavors either through The Unicode Consortium
or
with another organization with similar goals . As publishers, we
recognize
the pressing need in the internet community to find a common solution to
the
issues associated with language and character resolution on the web and
look
forward to working with your organization in reaching that objective.
Most sincerely,
Bob Hecht
Director - Electronic Publishing
Marcel Dekker, Inc.
270 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10016
(212) 696-9000 x-384
bhecht@dekker.com
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