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Re: another symbol: \iotaslash or \iotabar

Hello Alan, 

you wrote:

> Thanks for the references for iotabar.  It'll certainly be considered
> for inclusion, but like you say, MC is pretty crowded!
> 
> >J.Wesson: Tokamaks, Oxford Univ. Press 
> 
> Could you send me a photocopied page or two from this, so that I can
> see what iotabar looks like?

OK, I'll make a copy in the library today, if the book is available,
but I need your postal adress. Is it somewhere in the working group
papers or the TUG proceedings? If not tell me where to send it to.

A further note on <iotabar> and <iotaslash>:

Similar to <hbar> and <hslash> in QM, I've seen two different versions:
In a seminar paper, I've seen <iotabar> with a vertical bar, however 
I don't know from which book that was inspired. In the book I mentioned
I've seen a <iotaslash> with a small slash across the stem. I have the
impression, that handwriting prefers the slashed form, while the barred
form is used more often in print. Just to make sure: this has nothing 
to do with slashed letters like the Dirac/Feynman slash notation in QM. 
Ask J"org about it, if you want to hear more.

Last week I mentioned, that we might need even four glyph positions, 
if both italics and upright greek versions were included. Since <iotabar> 
is used as an identifier two glyphs would be enough, I think. When I
mentioned four glyphs, I had in mind that some books tend to use upright
lower case greek throughout, but in that case one should replace the 
MC font as a whole with something like an Euler version.

 
> >P.S. A general question: would it be a good idea to post a query 
> >about the need for specialized symbols on some of the major sci.*
> >newsgroups? Quite a lot of people in math, physics, etc use TeX
> >for their papers, but most of them aren't aware of this working
> >group. So questions to this list like: ``Do we really need this 
> >or that symbol?'' probably don't reach a wide enough audience.
> 
> I think this would be a very good idea.  I'll see what the rest of the
> MFG reckons...
 
I've been thinking of writing up a draft post, outlining the ideas behind 
the MFG project and asking scientists if they have special requirements. 
Such a post could be adressed to comp.text.tex, comp.fonts and several
sci.* newsgroups with a follow-up to comp.text.tex. However, I'm away 
for the next two weeks on a summer school on plasma physics, so I have
no time to care about that. Maybe I'll come back to it when I'm back.
In any case I'll post the draft to math-font-discuss first to allow for
some comments and suggestions before I'll post it to the net.

Greetings,

Ulrik.