Tens of thousands of graphic characters are used in publishing text, a large proportion of which have been defined in ISO/IEC 10646. Even where standard coded representations exist, however, there may be situations in which they cannot be keyboarded conveniently or accurately, or in which it is not possible to display the desired visual depiction of the characters.
To help overcome these barriers to the successful interchange of SGML and related documents, this part of ISO/IEC TR 9573 defines character entity sets for some widely used special graphic characters regularly used in the production of scientific and mathematical documents.
In many instances upper- and lower-case is used to differentiate the names of entities. It is assumed that any SGML concrete syntax used in conjunction with these entity names will be case sensitive.
The following standards contain provisions which, through reference in this text, constitute provisions of this part of ISO/IEC TR 9573. At the time of publication, the editions indicated were valid. All standards are subject to revision, and parties to agreements based on this part of ISO/IEC TR 9573 are encouraged to investigate the possibility of applying changes made in more recent editions of referenced standards.
ISO/IEC 8879:1986
ISO/IEC 9541-1:1991
ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000/Amd 1:2002
ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001
For the purposes of this part of ISO/IEC TR 9573 the definitions given in ISO/IEC 8879 apply.
This edition of the standard has been aligned with the Unicode 3.2 updates to ISO/IEC 10646:2000, as covered by Amendment 1 to the standard. For the purposes of backwards compatibility the names assigned to the characters in the original edition of the standard are shown before those assigned to the character in ISO/IEC 10646. References to characters in this part should, however, refer to the ISO/IEC 10646 name rather than the name originally assigned by ISO/IEC TR 9573.
To follow
Each character has a characteristic visual description known as a
"glyph". Systems using these entity sets need to be able to convert
each entity reference to an appropriate glyph. Where character sets based
on ISO/IEC 10646 are available this is typically done by conversion to an
entity reference of the form &xnnnnn; where nnnnn
is the five digit hexadecimal code listed in the column headed Unicode/10646,
where the first character indicates the plane of ISO/IEC 10646 to which the
character has been assigned. The entity name and descriptive comment are added
to the definition, giving it the form:
<!ENTITY frac78 "⅞"><!-- VULGAR FRACTION SEVEN EIGHTHS-->
The Stix consortium maintains a table of information about mathematical characters, including mappings to ISO/IEC entity sets. The following is an annotated list of cases where entity definitions appear to be different in these two collection.
During the review of this draft document these alignment issues will be reviewed and resolved.
OASIS distribute a set of entity declarations for use with the
DocBook markup language.
The following table lists the current differences between this set and the definitions described in this document.
During the review of this draft document these alignment issues will be reviewed and resolved.
W3C distribute a set of entity declarations for use with the
(X)HTML markup language.
The following table lists the current differences between this set and the definitions described in this document.
During the review of this draft document these alignment issues will be reviewed and resolved.
This section details cases where two entities with different names have been mapped to the same code point (so become indistinguishable to most XML applications, even if SGML applications could differentiate the original SGML SDATA entities).
In many cases these unifications are acceptable or intentional, for
example for reasons of convenience and compatibility the mathematical
greek
set ISOGRK3 is mapped to the standard Greek characters in the
BMP (so clashing with the ISOGRK1 definitions) rather than the Math
Italic alphabet in the 1Dxxx range. Similarly, the same character can
have different logical uses in different scientific disciplines,
but sometimes the duplication has occurred because it has not
been possible to retain differences foreseen in ISO/IEC TR 9573 within the
ISO/IEC 10646 character set. During the review of this draft the need for
duplication of these entities will be reviewed and resolved.
It is generally a bad idea to start an entity definition with a combining character as it makes normalisation dependent on the order of entity expansion, and in worst cases the combining character can combine with the markup, resulting in a normalised form that is no longer well formed XML.
In the current version of these entities, the entity definitions are defined to consist of a single space character (U+0020) followed by the combining character
There are several new characters planned for Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646
that may affect these definitions. See
In particular, jmath (ISOAMSO) which is currently defined to be j
could more usefully be defined to be the proposed character
LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J
at code point U+0237 and
perp (ISOTECH) could be defined to use PERPENDICULAR
at
code point U+27C2
(and so allow it to be distinguished from bottom (also in ISOTECH).
Each character set is shown as four column table.
The first column gives the entity name, these names are as used in previous versions of this report, and use the following abbreviation scheme:
Prefixes
l = left; r = right; u = up; d = down; h = horizontal; v= vertical;
b = back, reversed;
cu = curly;
cw = clock-wise; aw = anti clock-wise;
g = greater than; l = less than;
n = negated;
o = in circle;
s = small, short:
sq = square shaped;
thk = thick.;
x = extended, long, big;
Bodies
ap = approx;
arr = arrow; har = harpoon;
pr = precedes; sc = succeeds;
sub = subset; sup = superset;
Suffixes
b = boxed;
f = filled, black, solid;
e = single equals; E = double equals;
hk = hook;
s = slant;
t = tail;
v = variant;
w = wavy, squiggly;
2 = two of;
Upper-case letter means doubled
(or sometimes
two of
).
The second column gives the code points of the corresponding
character as 5 digit hexadecimal numbers, separated by
-
.
The third column gives a sample glyph representation of the character.
The fourth column gives the name of the character in two forms, Firstly the entity description as used in previous editions of this report. secondly (in uppercase) The name of the character as given in Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. In the case of combinations with combining characters or variant selectors, the name of the base character is given in uppercase, followed by an indication (in lower case) of the variant form.