[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: More missing glyphs...

At 12:06 97-04-18, Matthias Clasen wrote:

>Then there are the musical symbols
>\sharp, \natural and \flat, which should go to the (at that time
>non-existing) text companion font according to Justin Ziegler.
>First question:
> Is this really appropriate ? I know that they are really used a lot in
> some branches of math, but I dont know if anyone uses them in text mode.
> Are the music-packages using these symbols or do they have their own
> ones ?

At 18:04 97-04-18, Frank Mittelbach wrote:

>it is probably true that some mathematicians put their hands on any
>symbol they could reach from within TeX to get more symbols available
>(i did use them in my diploma thesis myself :-) and perhaps there is
>even an established branch (although i would like to know some more
>details before believing the latter) but i would claim it is
>sufficiently rare to allow for sacrifying encoding compatibility of
>the core in that case.

  I know they are used by some in differential geometry, as I recall it, in
order to indicate metric conversions (the coordinate free version of
shifting tensors up/down). In some sense the idea is intuitive, even
though, at first, it looks out of place.

  Actually, I think it can be problematic moving out any of the already
existing glyphs from the math encodings, before first positively ensuring
that they are not used as math symbols. People may have started using them
as math symbols, simply because they are accessible, for example.

  Perhaps such symbols should be classified as "sporadic", with their own
math encoding.

  Hans Aberg