Re: [NTG-context] Math literal colon

On 24 Jul 2015, at 18:34, Hans Hagen wrote:

On 7/24/2015 6:18 PM, Hans Aberg wrote:

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On 24 Jul 2015, at 16:28, Hans Hagen wrote:

On 7/24/2015 4:13 PM, Hans Aberg wrote:

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You can add it if you think it is no problem. Proper Unicode characters in the input help the readability, so putting them at high priority seems good.

fyi, on the agenda for the gyre font project is to have a monospaced font that has most of unicode math so that we can have decent editing (once we have the funding covered)

The Unicode monospace characters were added by mistake, because in computer science, style does not affect semantics, as it does math. Looking into old computer science books, they do not have monospace, and a I recall a Pascal compiler on Mac OS 9 that used styled, non-monospace fonts. So a monospace font may not be strictly necessary, though current UTF-8 plain text does not look good. In Xcode, part of the reason is that one cannot choose font per Unicode code point segments.

we're not talking of the monospace math alphabet (those are already covered but the fonts) but about a monospaced font for editing and verbatim (handy for manuals explaining math typesetting)

Right. But it was added because it is popular in computer science to use a monospace font, though not strictly necessary from the semantic point of view. So it makes me think that, instead of a monospace font for all the math characters, one might switch to a variable-width font in the input code, as actuallye been the case in the past. All that monospace tabbing will break, that is for sure.