From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 15:31:19 CST
On 1/26/2007 12:06 PM, Ruszlan Gaszanov wrote:
> Your arguments are based on the assumption that all authors of mathematical and technical texts are computer experts with a profound knowledge of Unicode Standard. In practice, however, many authors wouldn't even know about the existence of special characters for their needs, much less have the faintest clue how to input those characters. Therefore in many texts such characters would inevitably be encoded by means of applying formatting to base characters. Thus, whether you are searching for vector 'a' or factor 'a', you'd still have to search for plain ASCII 'a'. But now, you +ACo-also+ACo- need to search for the specific form of 'a'.
>
For mathematical use, I tend to doubt that, since most mathematicians
need to use sophisticated tools like TeX or LaTeX to submit papers.
Mathematical notation, except for very simple cases, requires a form of
2D layout capability that you can't easily fake with standard word
processing tools.
There is much work being done to support mathematical input, users of
such tools would automatically be steered towards using the correct
character codes and would not need to be concerned +ACo-how+ACo- they are encoded.
> Trust me - I'm a network administrator in a private University and I know what I'm talking about. Most of our professors' level of familiarity with computers is restricted to the very basic functions of MS Word and Internet Explorer. Some can't even get past logon screen without my assistance and quite a few don't know how to type URL in the address bar.
>
I don't doubt that they exist, but these people are obviously not
publishing math papers.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jan 26 2007 - 23:25:52 CST