G. Adam Stanislav wrote:
> The problem is that they are NOT widely used. The language I was having in mind
> is mathematics (and related languages, such as physics). In mathematic notation
> it is possible to use any Latin and Greek (and other) character with just
> about any diacritic.
And the Unicode Standard permits this behavior, as does no other
character set standard I know of (except a few "bibliographic
interchange" formats which most mathematicians have surely
never even heard of).
> And it is not a matter of prior use in this case either. Who are we to tell
> mathematicians and physicists that they may only use characters that are
> naturally dotless in their notation?
Who has proposed such a thing? This is a matter of rendering only.
> Here is a question about dotless i, by the way: It has been stated that it
> is a true character because it is used in Turkish. I would like to know if
> *that* was the reason Adobe has been including it in every font.
I think Adobe has it because Mac Roman does, and I believe that
was surely for Turkish purposes: the 8859-1 characters omitted in
MR are Icelandic ones, and Icelandic characters are precisely what is
displaced in 8859-9 in favor of Turkish characters.
> Again, I repeat my suggestion that no one has replied to yet: Why not have
> two standards? One for glyphs, one for characters and only characters?
There is a standard for glyphs, or rather a registry of glyphs which
assigns glyph numbers, but it is
poorly documented, poorly advertised, and unfunded.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge / Politzer
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