210529 - Equations are COMPLICATED text! (Please read on.)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 33127

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[fred bisshopp]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.75 [en]C-CCK-MCD   (WinNT; U)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

1. The unicode symbols &lang (\langle), &rang (\rangle) and \shy (\uparrow in
symbol or symbolps) are not rendered.
2. The only place I can find parts of large brackets, braces and integral signs
are in the symbol fonts.
3. &lmoust, &lmoustache, &rmoust and &rmoustache are not rendered.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Just use ⟨­⟩ in an html document.
2.Look for them in http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/bycodes.html
3.Try those too.

All are of these are in http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/fb/test.html

Actual Results:  
⎰⎱⎰⎱

­ - - - this is irritating.

­ - - - this is irritating too.

­ - - - this is downright weird.

­ - - - this is unfortunate.

­ - - - this is one of the ugliest workarounds I have ever written

|?|­|?| - - - this is merely documentation

NOTE! Some of the &shy's shown here were not present in the window this was
pasted from - Huh?


I have no problem whatever with looking forward to better results with unicode
characters, but I just don't agree they are ready for use by mathematicians yet.
Most of the fairly standard characters look better to me but -

> \langle and \rangle are really useful parts of Dirac notation, for example.

> \uparrow I can get without the symbol font, but it's a workaround (and see 
http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/fb/test.html for another workaround I'll 
promise never to do again).

> &lmous and &rmous aren't sufficient fot things like those tall thin round
brackets we use for matrices (just using a huge font-size gives terrible re-
sults).

Setting equations is hard enough to begin with, and taking away the symbol 
fonts before unicode is ready to do some of the things they can do makes it
even more difficult.

I'm not taking that personally, mind you, and I hope you will take my 
suggestion that you have gone too far, too fast in the same spirit.

regards - fred

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I'm sorry, but "Complex text layout" refers to certain specific scripts...  (as
the component description clearly says).  Equations are _not_ complex text layout.

In any case, the symbol font issue has been discussed at length.  We support
<font face="symbol"> in quirks mode (for backwards compat with existing pages).
 We do not support this in standards mode (it being non-standard) or in its CSS
"font-family: symbol" incarnation (for the same reason).

Marking duplicate of the bug with most of the relevant discussion.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 33127 ***