Comment by runarberg
4 years ago
This is interesting. I’m comparing this to how musical notation is encoded in unicode. I mean, there is a block dedicated to the symbols, so the symbols are encoded, but you can’t document music using only unicode. But musical documents are being composed and written all the time. To write music you need an additional software which arranges these symbols in a certain way so that they express the authors intention.
I guess math has a similar representation in unicode as well.
All that said, I think people use runes to express magic and spells (even to this day). I don’t think all the magical runes are expressed in unicode (and perhaps they shouldn’t). If you want to use a rune in that way, you might have to draw it out in SVG or something and then email it to your friends.
> I guess math has a similar representation in unicode as well.
It's an ongoing project. As you seem to have guessed, Unicode math symbols are just about as useless for representing math as Unicode music symbols are for representing music. Producing mathematical documents is done using dedicated software, generally LaTeX.
(And what you get is a PDF, because, as I noted in another comment, PDFs already support every notation there is, was, or ever will be.)
> (And what you get is a PDF, because, as I noted in another comment, PDFs already support every notation there is, was, or ever will be.)
I now have a perverse urge to invent a sculptural writing system just so I can break this completely reasonable claim.