Last modified: 2010-05-17 19:54:21 UTC
Is it possible in unicode to show that difference of 'phi'? I have a text, where I want \phi, and appears \varphi (when showin the formulæ in unicode, in the mediawiki). If I copy that unicode character (\phi) to different fonts, in some I get \varphi, and in some I get \phi. so, how to get those characters _always_ properly in unicode? maybe allowing only PNG of them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi is affected by this: in Firefox on Ubuntu Edgy (using Bitstream Vera Serif), the four variant glyphs for lowercase phi shown in the lede are indistinguishable, in particular the TeX markup \phi is indistinguishable from \varphi (they all look like the latter). Sometimes the distinction is important, so I think the presence of \phi should always force rendering of the png.
Unicode has a dedicated character for the stroked phi (GREEK PHI SYMBOL, U+03D5, ϕ), but apparently no specific character for the loopy phi. Font authors get to decide whether to render GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI, U+03C6, φ stroked or loopy. Of course, there's also variation in displaying U+03D5. All in all it's probably best to always use images when showcasing particular variants of a letter. But if there's also a difference sometimes for general mathematical use, as Peter Barry says, it would indeed be wise to always render phi to PNG. (When is there a difference?)
I got confused by this when reading the "Michael Dummett" section in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism - the Phi is displayed differently in the "exists x.phi(x)"-term than in the "t of which phi holds"-term. The first one displays as the latin small letter, the second one as the greek one. I tested this with Ubuntu Feisty with both Firefox and Epiphany with different fonts. If you do not happen to know that both symbols should actually be the same one, that statement there does not make any sense.
We were discussing this issue again on VPT. We noticed that in html \phi is rendered as html "small letter phi" φ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Rendering_of_phi_in_.3Cmath.3E Lexically this is seems correct, but in latex \phi should always be the small stroked version and \varphi should always be the loopy version of the character. (See http://mirror.hmc.edu/ctan/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-letter.pdf ) Because in unicode, the small letter phi can be either loopy OR stroked, translating \phi as unicode small letter phi is not correct. \phi should therefore either be always rendered in PNG, or alternatively, we could render it with ϕ Since we always use \phi in a math context and ϕ is reserved for the small stroked math version of the phi symbol, this is a correct translation when convert math. I have attached patches for both alternative corrections.
Created attachment 6486 [details] render as U+03D5
Created attachment 6487 [details] render always as png
*** Bug 16438 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Applied the PNG fix in r66580 At least that is consistent.
