From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Mar 05 2005 - 15:20:58 CST
At 10:51 AM 3/5/2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
> > Of course Unicode also has its own italic characters, U+1D434 to
> > U+1D467, but these are not intended for general purpose use.
>
>Among other drawbacks, they only encode the basic Latin and Greek
>alphabets, not digits, punctuation, or accented letters
They are also intended to convey a specific set of distinctions
that are applied to the use of these forms in Mathematics.
Mathematicians used to view the printers' sets as their playground.
(Nearly) anything available was pressed into service, imbued with
a particular meaning and then used in the evolving notation of
whatever sub-specialty the particular author was working in.
In some ways, it's a bit like the Cherokee script using some Latin
letterforms, but for completely unrelated uses. In other ways,
that comparison is faulty, because mathematicians tend to use
the order of the alphabet when naming variables in a meaningful
way (or use mnemonic naming).
However, these uses are different from the way italics or bold
are used in text, which usually is to lend emphasis, or to differentiate
parts of the text from each other, or in a merely stylistic way,
as in formatting section and chapter headers.
A./
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