RE: Mathematical accents

Besides the case of an accent over a multi-character expression, that David identifies, I also recommend the mover form in the case of multiple accents on a single character.  The reasoning is not as compelling as in the multi-character case, but in practice, it usually works out better, since many/most systems screw up multiple combining accents in some way or another.

In the other cases, e.g. a variable name or mtext, I usually recommend using the combining accents, mostly because that's what people are used to typing.

--Robert


Dr. Robert Miner
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Design Science, Inc.
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:dev-tech-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of David Carlisle
> Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 5:50 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Mathematical accents
> 
> 
> they are all correct (from the point of view of being valid mathml)
> but I think that, where the diacritic is being used as an operator that
> could potentially be applied to more than just a single letter, using
> mover with the non combining form is preferable (which is why all the
> mathml entity names for accents expand to the non-combining form if at
> all possible).
> 
> If you apply an operator to a base then (even if the rendering is the
> same, or in some cases improved) if a pre-composed character is used
> searching and other uses are far more consistent if the operator and
> base are consistently marked up the same way for all combinations (even
> if the file undergoes unicode normalisation) and this isn't the case
> where combining characters are used.
> 
> mathml does make use of a combining negation slash to make negated
> operators, but there one (can at least) consider a negated operator
> such
> as (not equals) as a distinct operator in its own right, rather than a
> result of a higher order compositin of the original operator with a
> negation.
> 
> Of course the above discussion relates to rendering/searching/other-
> user
> visible stuff. Iff a system decides to use some precomposed glyphs from
> a font to render certain mover combinations, that is up to the system.
> 
> David
> 
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