Re: Unicode and math symbols

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

   > And yes, just about all 30,000 fonts in Type 1 format have fi and fl.

   Nothing bad about that. Any good font should have these ligatures,
   and a few more. But it shouldn't matter which number they have,
   you should be able to send "f","i" to the font and it should
   do the substitution on its own.

That I do not agree with.  Yes, low end applications will work this way
with GX and OpenType.  But high end applications will need to work at
this level themselves, *not* let the system machinery do it.  And after
the application decides to use a ligatures it must have a way of
selecting it from the font.

   > with Windows have these glyphs.  And you can easily get at them in NT,
   > even NT 3.51.

   But a user shouldn't type then in as ligatures. He/she won't in TeX.
   This is a TeX forum, and we shouldn't get too distracted by low
   quality stuff.

Who said the user should type in ligatures?  And yes, I mean TeX and such.
If TeX decides after much cogitation that it wants to use ffi it has to
have a way to select that from the font.

   > You miss my point. I don't care where you put them.  The point is that if
   > everyone decides for him or herself where to put them, we will have a mess.
   > If the UNICODE consortium decides it may be a mess, but everyone
   > will be dealing with the *same* mess.

   Unicode decided to set apart an area to mess around with, but to
   have the rest clean. This doesn't give you a licence to mess
   around everywhere.

You are still missing my point.  The private use area or whatever area
is worthless.  Only if everyone puts there stuff in the same place
is there any sense in UNICODE numbers.  Otherwise we are back to the
same old mess...

Regards, Berthold.