Subject: Scientific and Chemical Fonts

From: [email-masked] (Rzepa, Henry)
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 21:45:16 +0000

Does anyone know of any ISO standard 8-bit
(or even 16 bit!) character sets useful to
chemists? I am aware of one Truetype chemistry font deposited at
OSC, but is it "standard"? I ask because at the WWW conference at
Chicago, a plea went out for good quality scientific fonts for use
with WWW browsers, ie the font must be capable of inclusion on
X11 R7 as well as PC and Mac systems.

There is currently an IETF working party meeting in December to
finalise the issue of how character sets other than the ISO Latin-1
can be defined in e.g. WWW browsers. This is the ONLY character
set currently supported in HTML, and is pretty limited. A
scientific character set implemented in PS, Truetype and bitmap
fonts for X11and personal computers in the public domain
would be precious to us all.

Also for information is the implication that HTML 2.1 will support
additional fonts, although it may be some time before WWW browsers
implement the HTML 2.1 dtd.

Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY.
Tel: +44 171 594 5809. Fax: +44 171 594 5804. E-mail: [email-masked]
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html. Sent via MacPPP/MacTCP using Eudora 2.1

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From: [email-masked] (Hinsen Konrad)
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 94 18:31:04 -0400

All ISO standards for fonts cover only letters and other glyphs used
to write down ordinary words. No symbol font of any kind has ever
been standardized.

There are some quasi-standards like the PostScript symbol set, but
they are probably not very useful for chemists.

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