[rfc-i] Unicode in xml2rfc v3

[Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

we're at the moment revising RFC8312, the CUBIC congestion controller for TCP. There is quite a bit of math in RFC8312, and even more in the papers that describe CUBIC, some of which we're planning to roll into RFC8312bis.

That math uses a bunch of greek letters, which we needed to ASCIIfy for RFC8312. One thing I was planning to do for the bis was to reduce the difference between the paper and the RFC, by using the greek letters in the RFC. Since, you know, xml2rfc v3 is supposed to handle Unicode.

Except, as most of you probably know but I didn't, you can't just use Unicode. You need to wrap it in a <u> tag, and it must be rendered with "num" in the format.

Which means that while I can write a formula in kramdown-rfc2629:

~~~ math
W_{est} = W_{est} + α_{aimd} * \frac{segments_{acked}}{cwnd}
~~~

and have it automatically rendered in SVG as (via tex2svg):


and in ASCII (via asciitex) as

                       segments
                               acked
W    = W    + α     * -------------
 est    est    aimd        cwnd

but I cannot use "α<sub>aimd</sub>" in the text of the RFC - it gets rendered as "&#945;_(aimd)".

And using "<u>α</u><sub>aimd</sub>" gets rendered as the even uglier ""α" (GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA, U+03B1)_(aimd)". I can of course play with the format string, but since there is no way to not at least use "char", I have basically no option here.

I had really been hoping that v3 would enable better math. Unicode is not just for names...

Thanks,
Lars

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