> | A bit out of my line of fire but I was wondering whether the
> | "Deutsche Schrift" letters, 'german fraktur hand forms' have been
> | suggested/mentioned for an inclusion? In Germany, a vector (in
> | mathematics) can be either written as a latin letter with a
> | superscript arrow, or alternatively, with a 'german letter' (see
> | attachments).
I have run into these letters myself in lectures on theoretical computer
science in Germany. I can assure you that the German handwritten fraktur
glyphs are to > 99% of all German math and compsci students just as
alien as say Hebrew or Katakana characters (which at least one of our
logic professors also used). If I see a handwritten fraktur form used by
a professor on a blackboard and later the printed fraktur version in the
word processed exam sheets, then I will have great difficulties in
recognizing them as being the same letter. Fraktur is practically
unknown among the under 40 year old Germans (including math graduate
students) and therefore rather few people could associate the
handwritten and the printed form with each other. If they are both used,
then they are perceived as clearly different symbols.
On a more general note, I consider the use of fraktur characters (no
matter which form) in mathematics to be bad style anyway. Modern
mathematical notation gets its variety of symbols primarily from the
Latin and Greek alphabet, combined with numerous combining characters
(TeX certainly had a lot of influence here). Some mathematics professors
have made it their mission to impress their students with more and more
exotic symbols, but this should more be seen as an eccentricity than
something that helps the reader or that the publishing industry should
support with a lot of energy.
Exotic glyph variants in character sets have the danger of becoming a
self-fulfilling prophecy. As soon as they are available, some
mathematician will consider it to be cool to use them, no matter whether
this improves communication with the reader or not.
I like the idea of having comprehensive support for established
mathematical publishing practice in Unicode, but overdoing it just leads
to abuse of symbols. I hope the people selecting these extensions will
find a reasonable balance. There are certainly no fields of mathematics
where one really needs 1000 different symbols in the same context. Try
to avoid including symbols that can be confused with each other too
easily, because supporting the wide use of easily confusable symbols
will not be a great service to your readers of scientific publications.
> | Apart from that, it's still legal to use this form of
> | handwriting, even though few people use it.
I don't think there are any legal regulations regarding what scripts are
allowed to be used in Germany. Some of the handwriting from doctors that
I have seen while I worked in a hospital was hardly describable as
related to any form of the Latin script. Everything is allowed if just
the intended recipient (say a pharmacist) is able to read it.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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