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stipub / stixfonts

OpenType Unicode fonts for Scientific, Technical, and Mathematical texts
SIL Open Font License 1.1
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Question: Why is U+306E (the only Hiragana character) supported? #269

Open miruohotspring opened 3 months ago

miruohotspring commented 3 months ago

Since version 2.10, the only Japanese character, U+306E (hiragana “の”), has been included in the STIX Two Math Regular font.

Perhaps because the existence and intent of this specification is not widely known, it causes unexpected display problems in some Japanese language papers or operating systems on rare cases.

I would like to hear about the specific intent and purpose of adding this character, if any.

tiroj commented 3 months ago

The presence of this character actually goes all the way back to version 1.00 of the original STIX fonts (it appears in the set of the STIXGeneral.otf font). I can’t offer any insight on why it was originally included, but can confirm that it occurs in STIX Two Math simply because it was inherited from the earlier STIX set.

@davidmjones perhaps someone at STI Pub remembers why this character was included?

davidmjones commented 3 months ago

There's no way to know, unfortunately; I can only speculate. There was an extensive discovery process where mathematicians world-wide were asked to submit lists of notation for possible inclusion in Unicode and the STIX font. My guess is that one of them included の for some reason and it slipped into the final font.

Interestingly, I can't find any indication that anyone submitted U+3088 "よ", which is used for the Yoneda embedding.

@miruohotspring Can you say more about the problem inclusion of this character in STIX Two Math causes?