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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: DITROFF standards
Message-ID: <1018@uw-beaver>
Date: Wed, 10-Apr-85 14:13:57 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1018
Posted: Wed Apr 10 14:13:57 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Apr-85 02:01:43 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: jqj%gvax@Cornell.ARPA (J Q Johnson)

Re a recent posting discussing ditroff standards, one of the major
limitations of ditroff is the small number of special characters
on the S character set.  The ditroff manual documents slightly over
60 such characters plus those Greek letters that do not look very 
much like Roman.  A set of 60 special characters isn't very large.  
The DITROFF set does not even include such useful characters as forall 
or thereexists.

There have been various efforts to document more complete sets of
special characters, ranging from the Metafont AMSY set (also quite
small) to Xerox's Character Set Standard (quite large).  Has anyone
made similar efforts to standardize a larger set of special characters
in the ditroff world?

In ditroff, of course, one could (assuming it existed) mount the
AMSY or CMSY font and get special characters by a font switch.  But
that's not very device independent.  What is needed, I think, is
a widely accepted convention about what additional (non-S) special
characters should exist, and standardized 2-character names for
them.  Then I could count on saying "\(*fa x" and know that if a
forall symbol was available I would get it.

Anyone have other thoughts on this?