From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sat May 14 2005 - 17:33:06 CDT
At 13:51 -0700 2005/05/14, Murray Sargent wrote:
>The STIX committee (see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr25/ for
>references) chose the sets of mathematical alphanumerics. I agree with
>you that sans-serif characters in general are rarely used in
>mathematics, at least in the mathematics of physics. My guess is that
>the STIX committee didn't find enough mathematical usage for sans-serif
>upright and italic Greek characters to justify including them. One can
>always resort back to higher-level character formatting to render such
>characters, but then the sans-serif distinction is lost on export to
>plain text. Such loss would imply a change in semantics. But so far,
>anyhow, we haven't seen a need for mathematical sans-serif and
>sans-serif italic Greek sets.
Based on the character semantics principle, the sans-serif forms
should probably not have been added. But now, when they are added,
and cannot be removed, the lack of the Greek sans-serif forms looks
as an anomaly. I will probably stick to the serif forms, and not use
the non-serif ones. So it will not be a big issue to myself. I think
most mathematicians will do likewise.
-- Hans Aberg
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