[XeTeX] [unimath] Re: Should xelatex have its own kernel? (was: "Conflict between xunicode and fontspec?")

[Will Robertson]

On 08/02/2008, at 11:19 AM, Joel C. Salomon wrote:

> I've been favorably impressed by Murray Sargent's "Nearly Plain-Text
> Encoding of Mathematics" (http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/); perhaps the
> copy-and-pasteable text in the PDF file should be (mostly) compatible
> with that.

I do agree that the least amount of markup without losing information  
is the best way to input maths. His encoding is a good system but  
completely incompatible, at this stage, of how (La)TeX does maths.

> (I could be wrong about all this, of course, but that's my reading of
> Murray's paper.  Will, you want to ask him directly?)

I'm unfortunately not in contact with him.

>> I mean, you could approximate good maths typesetting with plain
>> unicode text with all these spaces and so on, but you'd still not be
>> able to do superscripts or subscripts, or limits, or integrals that
>> change size, or square roots, or ... so what's the point?
>
> Doesn't Cambria Math include different glyphs for subscript and
> scriptscript sizes, and for constructing integrals and radicals of
> different heights?  But for copy-and-paste, they should be encoded as
> '∫' or '√'.

Yes, it contains all that information. All I'm saying is that  
information can't be expressed in a stream of plain unicode text, so  
why should the font designer spend all that time inserting what is  
essentially kerning information between a huge number of characters  
that will only be replicated by the real maths typesetting program.

Not this is not the same as including in the font the sizes of the  
skips that should be used! XeTeX and Word do use the metadata in the  
font to apply the correct spacing rules. But this is different than  
explicit kerning information being present between the individual  
maths glyphs.

Cheers,
Will
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