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weird math fonts

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jl345 6 posts

edited almost 12 years ago

Maybe it’s just general persnicketiness on my part, but why do ℬℰℱℋℐℒℳℛ appear (in Firefox and rekonq) in a different type than the letters 𝒜𝒞𝒟𝒢𝒥𝒦𝒩𝒪𝒫𝒬𝒮𝒯𝒰𝒱𝒲𝒳𝒴𝒵? And how can I get a letter like or to stand upright like ℙℚ but by itself without getting italicized?

(Sorry for the new username. I lost my password and for some reason Yahoo can’t get mail from the forums.)

 
admin Administator 63 posts

edited almost 12 years ago

Perhaps you need to install the STIX fonts (see here for some slightly out-of-date, but still useful instructions).

I see those calligraphic letters all set in the same font. And, moreover and are set upright (as, for that matter, are 𝔸 and 𝕓).

Alas, what you see is strongly-dependent on what fonts you have installed.

In more detail:

On my system, ℬ (U+212C) is available in STIXGeneral, Apple Symbols and Arial Unicode MS. But 𝒜 (U+1D49C) is only available in STIXGeneral. In current versions of Firefox, I believe the default value of font.mathfont-family is

MathJax_Main, STIXNonUnicode, STIXSizeOneSym, STIXSize1, STIXGeneral, Asana Math, Symbol,
   DejaVu Sans, Cambria Math

so the version in STIXGeneral is what I see.

 
distler 123 posts

P.S.: Congratulations on figuring out how to make this page ill-formed! It took a bit of work to fix the issue.

 
jl345 6 posts

edited 11 years ago

I didn’t mean to do that, but you like to make the forum better and better, so all’s well that ends well, I hope…

With the STIX fonts, those letters do all look the same, in the curlier script. *** However, I think part of the problem is that the calligraphic BEFHIKLM live in a totally different area of Unicode than the other calligraphic letters. Your ”ℬ” at U+212C certainly doesn’t immediately follow the ”𝒜” at U+1D49C. The very next symbol after ”𝒜” is ”𝒝” (undefined), followed by ”𝒞” and ”𝒟”, because the Unicrats who designed these things in their infinite wisdom ensured that only a portion of the “calligraphic” alphabet was put in a different codepage on an alternate plane of existence, where some fonts may or may not even have glyphs, and the glyph may very well look different, because there is absolutely no assurance in Unicode of any consistency in the way fonts are going to be applied across such vastly different planes of the code space. Why isn’t it possible to put real ASCII letters in a calligraphic font? Seems like it should work but it doesn’t, in my browser anyways:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head><title>Probability Space</title></head>
<body>
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
  <mfenced>
    <mi>Ω</mi>
    <mi mathvariant='script'>F</mi>
    <mi mathvariant='double-struck'>P</mi>
  </mfenced>
</math>
</body>
</html>`
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