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Re: Script and Boldscript

> In the book of Penrose and Rindler, only capital script letters occur. The 
> differentiation script vs. bold script is extremely rare, the above 
> reference is about the only one I'm aware of.
> 
> However, lowercase script is used, most notably the Landau symbol \scr{o}.
> --J"org Knappen

Generally speaking, it seems a bad idea to use lowercase script and
lowercase blackboard bold in math because in subscript size or smaller
they are too hard to read, especially at lower resolutions. Even if
such uses have occurred in practice, it might be wrong to encourage
them by giving them equal place in the new math font encoding.

Exceptional cases such as the Landau symbol which have a letterform
that is more resistant to corruption than some of the other lowercase
script letters, might better be done as miscellaneous symbols in one
of the math fonts, such as was formerly done for \Re and \Im, rather
than by including an entire lowercase script alphabet. Unfortunately,
however, I imagine the implementation details would be a headache.

I suspect that one motivation for the style of the `calligraphic'
letters in cmsy was to avoid an over-complex script style that would
break down at low resolution and/or subscript sizes.  A skilled
Metafont artist like Yannis could probably produce something more
scripty than the cmsy letters, that is still reasonably robust, but it
will surely be rather difficult, won't it?

Michael Downes                              mjd@math.ams.org (Internet)